Stuck for name ideas? RouteNote‘s taken, sorry.
Our partner stores will reject content with artist names or track/release titles that they think are too generic.
Firstly, stores don’t like names which make it hard to distinguish between content. Most commonly, this means we can’t accept artist names that are just one standard first name, e.g. “John”, “Ahmed”, “Saanvi”. If stores accepted names like this, then very quickly, they’d have a million artists just called “John”, making it difficult for customers to tell the difference between them.
Secondly, stores don’t like names or titles that are likely to come up when their customers are searching for someone else. For example, this might be calling your band “The”, which will come up when people are searching for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or similar.
Thirdly, stores don’t like titles that are purely descriptive of the content. Avoid titles like “Instrumental Trap Beat”, or “Chill Lo-fi Groove”. Stores don’t like titles that are mostly genres; so “Jazz Tune”, “EDM Track” or similar.
It can be a little tricky to work out exactly what a store considers to be ‘generic’, so here’s some examples of metadata we’ve had submitted that were rejected, then an example of what would have made it acceptable.
| Unacceptable | Acceptable | |
| Artist name | Jess | Jess Smith |
| Artist name | ASMR Relaxing Sounds | Jon’s ASMR Relaxing Sounds |
| Track title | Lofi Beat | Chilled Strung Out Lo-Fi Tune |
| Track title | Happy Song | A Happy Tune for a Sunny Day |
| Track title | Untitled | Untitled Improvisation, No. IV |
| Album title | Demos | Demo Recordings, 2002 – 2008 |
| Album title | EP | Fire EP |
Remember that the more unique your name, the easier it is for people to find you on stores or through internet searches.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions or concerns!
See also:
What is misleading metadata?
What am I unable to include in my release’s metadata?