Song credits on Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal: how to get every writer, producer and player shown

A song credit on a streaming service is a line of metadata, not a setting in your artist dashboard. Neither Spotify for Artists nor Apple Music for Artists lets you type a producer's name onto a track. The names arrive with the release, from whoever delivered it: your distributor or label.

That one fact explains almost every "why isn't my producer listed?" complaint. If the name never went into the distributor's form, or the form had nowhere to put it, no store can show it.

The pipe: from your form to the store

Most distributors deliver to stores in a DDEX format called ERN (Electronic Release Notification). According to DDEX's own guidance, "ERN-4 as well as the RIN 1.1 file format supports rich communication of roles and credits information." Each person on a track is a Contributor with one or more Role values (producer, mixing engineer and so on), an optional instrument, and optional DisplayCredits text. DDEX says DisplayCredits are "intended to be shown, where deemed appropriate by the DSP, to end-users."

Note the last clause. The standard can carry a full liner note; each store decides how much of it to display.

What each platform does with it

Spotify. "We show all credits from the metadata your label or distributor sends us," says Spotify for Artists, covering producers, engineers, songwriters and featured artists. A songwriter's name is clickable only when they have a Songwriter Page with a connected Written By playlist, which Spotify describes as a beta. To fix a credit, ask your distributor to resend the track's metadata; Spotify says updates usually appear within 7 days, and warns that some distributors don't support credits yet.

Apple Music. Apple's delivery guidance is the most demanding of the three. It wants performer credits with specific instruments (Vocals, Guitar, Synth Bass, Drum Machine), discourages a generic "Performer" credit, and says a band should not be credited with instruments as a group: credit each member. It separates Composer, Lyrics and Songwriter (the last for someone who did both, or when it's unclear), asks for production and engineering credits that "include all staff involved in the final recording", and an Immersive Engineer on Dolby Atmos releases. Updates to existing releases can take up to five business days, and contributors can carry an Apple Artist ID or ISNI.

Tidal. Tidal launched interactive credits pages in July 2019, reported Music Business Worldwide: tap the roles under an artist's name to filter their tracks by Songwriter, Production, Composer or Musician. We could not find a current Tidal support page on how contributors submit credits [unverified], so treat the distributor as the source here too.

A checklist that gets every name shown

1. Collect credits before you upload. Same session as the split sheet: legal name, credited name, role, instrument.
2. Use Apple's standard as your floor. It is the strictest, so a form filled for Apple covers the others.
3. Check your distributor actually has the fields. If its form only asks for "artist" and "songwriter", the producer has nowhere to go. That is a reason to choose a different distributor.
4. Credit people, not the band. Each member with their own instrument.
5. After release, check all three apps. If a name is missing, send the distributor a correction and wait the 5 to 7 days the stores quote before chasing again.

What we think

Credits are where streaming still loses to vinyl sleeves, and the bottleneck is no longer the stores or the standard. DDEX has carried rich credits for years, and Apple publishes a detailed spec. The weak link is the upload form at the distributor, which is often the only place an independent artist ever enters this data. Our read is that a distributor's credit fields are now a fair test of whether it takes non-headline musicians seriously, and producers, engineers and session players should ask to see that form before a release goes out, not after.