Apple Music for Artists

If you’ve already released music, you have a profile waiting for you on Apple Music. To claim it, you need to have an Apple ID. If you are already an Apple or iTunes user, you’ll use those login details. If you aren’t an Apple user, you will need to sign up first.

The goal of this step is for Apple Music to identify and verify your identity or your relationship with the respective artists or a band. To speed up the reviewing and verification process, make sure to provide as much information as possible, including available distributor connections, personal websites as well as accounts from other media channels, particularly social media. Once approved, Apple will send an email to the address of your Apple ID account.

Bear in mind that only artists or artist managers can claim an artist page on the platform. Therefore, if you’re a label representing a musician wanting to claim their Apple Music for Artists profile, it’s important that you actively work with your artist and make sure that they undergo the verification process within a given period of time. If after 30 days, no action is taken by the artist or their artist manager on your request, the request will expire.

Once you claim your artist page, you’ll be able to explore a large amount of information about your music, including number of streams, most played tracks, playlists your track is on, number of listeners, and number of purchases. There are trend graphs that let you dive deeper visually. You can also explore maps showing the countries and cities in which your track is streamed, or dig into country-specific data about each track. It’s comparable to Spotify; exactly what you’d expect from a store as large as Apple.

As part of the new features package, Apple has introduced a section called ‘Measure’ that allows musicians to see and check how their music measures up on the Apple Music platform. First, you can get insight into your ‘Overview’ to view your Latest Plays; your Average Daily Listeners; Song Purchases, and Shazams, as well as see your Milestones, Top Cities and Video Plays.

Particularly milestones are something that you can proudly share on any social media - whether it’s Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, or Instagram. This way you can let the world know about your music successes as well as celebrate them with your fans. What’s more, Apple tries to make it fun by giving you badges for different milestones.

Furthermore, you can have a closer look at what’s been currently trending for you on the ‘Trends’ page and use the information to identify possible opportunities for your music as well as your marketing strategies. You can view where your target audience is based and how many Shazams, Song Plays, and Downloads you’re getting for a selected time frame. Additionally, you can filter your results based on what you’d wish to see and break out the information about your audience and their consumption of your music by gender, age, and location.

Regarding the location, you can find out more about where exactly your target audience is based on the ‘Places’ page. The last page in your Measure section is ‘Your Music’ where all your music is listed - from your releases, to the playlists featuring your music, to your Shazams.

All the data above that you receive in your Measure section can ultimately help you select the right marketing efforts as well as choose the best places and venues to organize your live music performances.

Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, so it’s no surprise that you can find Shazam data in the AMFA dashboard. As discussed previously, you can find all Shazam-related information and data in the Measure section of your artist page. There you can see how many times each of your tracks was shazamed and which songs had the most shazams. My track “All Around the House” has apparently been shazamed 22 times.

As an electronic music producer, I smile when I think of 22 people standing in the middle of a club, holding up their phones, trying to discover the killer track they hear on the dancefloor. You probably have noticed but just to remind you, Shazam for Artists officially closed down after the company’s purchase by Apple. Therefore, to access all relevant Shazam data, you’ll have to go through AMFA.

Although before, AMFA didn’t offer a lot of opportunities to personalize your profile, this has now changed with the introduction of the newest features. As of now, artists are finally free to take more control over their Artist Profile and thus connect with their fans using their own words. Besides adding a picture – which was already possible before – you can now create a customized biography by answering a set of short questions that will appear on your Apple Music artist page. This means you can finally say goodbye to the bio that was taken out from your AllMusic account - if you want to, if not, you can still have it shown on your artist page.

Additionally, you’ll be able to provide relevant information like your hometown, other names or date of birth, as well as identify the important team and band members (including the Admin, Analyst, or Profile Editor), collaborators, or influencers. Finally, you can add your pronouns. All the information above can then be uploaded and edited in two sections – Artist Content and Account - in the top navigation of your artist profile.

Nevertheless, what hasn’t changed so far is that Apple Music for Artists still doesn’t provide a way to add external links to your social media and website, or to share playlists with your fans the way you can on Spotify or Traxsource. On the other hand, the process of submitting lyrics to your songs has been simplified. All you have to do now is to copy your pre-formatted lyrics and paste them into the ‘lyrics’ section of your individual tracks.

Remember, that lyrics present a great tool for your fans to connect deeper with your music and are associated with increased engagement and longer time of plays. If, therefore, you see that your lyrics include mistakes or are not showing up correctly, don’t hesitate to click on ‘Request a Change’ in the Lyrics section where you can state the individual mistakes alongside the correct version of them. Your lyrics should be corrected within a time frame of 10 business days.

As stated before, Apple Music for Artists also comes with an app that you can download for free in the Apple Store. If you use the Bandcamp for Artists or Spotify for Artists apps, the design will be pretty standard with a rather simple yet clear outlook. It gives you mobile views of all your analytical data which you can access from wherever you are. Currently it’s only available for iPhone users who have iOS 14.05 or higher.

With the newest features introduced, it feels like Apple Music is more and more catching up with the competition (particularly Spotify), both when it comes to artists and artist personalization. We would therefore definitely recommend claiming your profile on AMFA to take full advantage of all features that the app has to offer - from tracking your analytics, to measuring how your music ranks, to making your artist profile as personalized as possible.

Additionally, if you really want to dive into the numbers, downloading your sales data will give you a full breakout of sales and streams.