01Track & Release Titles
✕
No ALL CAPS or stylized capitalization —
PiPeLiNe or PIPELINE gets auto-corrected by TuneCore, or held by a store until fixed.✓
Standard title case: small words — a, an, and, as, at, but, by, for, from, in, into, nor, of, off, on, onto, or, out, over, so, the, to, up, with, yet — stay lowercase unless first or last word.
✓
Known acronyms (
NYC, FBI, USA) can stay fully capitalized, but only by emailing TuneCore support from your account address with the release's UPC — it isn't automatic.✓
A live recording's track title must end with
(Live). If most of a release is live, the release title should signal it too ("Live," "In Concert," "Unplugged").✓ Correct
PipelineSimple title case, nothing to fix.
The Long Way Home"The" capitalized because it opens the title.
Night Drive (Live)"(Live)" capitalized, correctly appended.
USA Tour IntroAcronym kept uppercase — pre-approved with TuneCore support + UPC.
✕ Wrong
PIPELINEAll caps — auto-corrected or held by the store.
PiPeLiNeStylized/creative capitalization, not allowed on titles.
the Long Way HomeOpening word must be capitalized, even if it's a small word like "the."
Night Drive (live)"(live)" must be capitalized as "(Live)."
02Artist Name
✓
Unlike titles, your artist name is exempt from the title-case auto-formatting — it can be stylized however you like (TuneCore's own examples:
MGMT, TLC, tUnE-yArDs).✕
TuneCore states this directly: artist names are case-sensitive, and formatting must be identical across every release you distribute. "Zacoon" on one release and "ZACOON" or "zacoon" on the next creates two different artist identities to the system, not one.
✓
Each contributing artist goes in their own separate artist field — never combine names into one text string like
Zacoon & Friend.✕
No SEO-stuffed or keyword artist names (e.g. naming yourself something like "Chill Beats" to get found in searches) — platforms actively police and remove this.
✓ Correct
ZacoonSame exact string, every release, forever.
Zacoon (release 1) → Zacoon (release 2)Identical casing carried across releases.
Zacoon — separate field: Featured ArtistA collaborator gets their own artist field, not merged text.
✕ Wrong
zacoonLowercase on a later release — reads as a different artist to the system.
ZACOONAll caps on another release — same mismatch problem.
Zacoon Invisible trailing space — looks identical, technically a different string.
Zacoon feat. FriendTwo artists crammed into one field instead of two separate ones.
03Cover Artwork Text
✓
Square image, 1600–3000px, JPG/PNG/GIF, under 10MB, RGB color.
✓
Only the artist name and release title may appear as text on the cover — and only if they match your submitted metadata exactly, character for character.
✕
No URLs, emails, social handles, prices, QR codes, store names, or platform logos anywhere on the artwork.
04Keeping SOCAN, CMRRA & Panorama in sync with it
✓
The ISRC is the real machine-matching key across all four accounts — text matching is only the human fallback. Still, keep the fallback clean.
✓
Use the exact same title and artist string — same capitalization, same punctuation, same spacing — in your SOCAN work registration, your CMRRA registration, and TuneCore. Don't let "self-published" variations creep in between accounts.
✓
Embed that same exact string directly into the audio file's own metadata (Mp3tag / BWF MetaEdit) before it goes anywhere — this is your version of the facts, independent of any dashboard.
✓
Log the canonical version once in your song catalog tracker and copy from it every time you register somewhere new — never retype it from memory.
The failure mode to avoid: typing "Zacoon" correctly the first time, then "zacoon" or "Zacoon " (trailing space) somewhere later. It looks identical at a glance and is exactly the kind of mismatch that creates black-box, unmatched royalties.
05Your canonical strings, once, to copy from
Artist nameZacoon
Track title (example)Pipeline
GenreTrip-hop
PublisherZacoon (self-published)