Precise ensures your music is available and delivered to streaming, social media and music-video platforms globally. 

We work directly with major platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Facebook, SoundCloud, Vevo and many others to maximise editorial and promotional opportunities for our partners. 

Precise take a hands-on approach with our partners – actively working to optimise both new and catalogue releases. 

We proactively audit your catalogue, ensuring that you’re collecting royalties which are often overlooked or not collected by larger distributors due to the manual effort that this requires.

Our in house team ensures all of your releases have visual content (such as Spotify Canvases, lyric videos and visualisers) and implement campaigns to drive streams and awareness.

If you are approved or onboarded as a distribution client, you will have access to our dashboard where you can submit releases, track your streams across multiple platforms, manage your catalogue and more. Your account manager will be able to walk you through our dashboard functionality, best practices of using and making the most out of all of the features.

Please note that we are not a public distribution. Precise only works with a highly curated roster of partners to ensure that we can properly support and add value to them.  If you’re interested in working with Precise, you can reach out to us using the “Contact” button.

If you are approved as a distribution client, you will have access to our dashboard where you can upload releases, manage your catalogue and view your analytics and streaming data.

Music and metadata requirements

• High resolution artwork (preferably 3000×3000 pixels in size)
  Please ensure your artwork accurately reflects the artist name and song title if relevant. For instance, your artwork should not contain a different name than the artist name you’re releasing music under. If you have multiple primary artists on a track, these should not be referenced as ft. or feat. in the cover art. Instead, this should be styled as “with or X/&”. E.g Future & Drake
• Mastered, high quality audio files (preferably a 24bit .wav file or flac files)
• Song title and artist name
• Composer/writer names (please ensure you submit the full names of any songwriters, not pseudonym or performing names)
• Performer information (such as specific instruments e.g “Drums” “Guitar” and vocal credits)
• Production & mixing & mastering credits
• Your desired release date (we recommend you upload any releases to us 3-4 weeks ahead of the desired release date)

If your release has been previously released by another distributor, it is crucially important that you include the original ISRC and UPC codes assigned by the previous distributor.

If you’re releasing a track for the first time, Precise can assign an ISRC and UPC on your behalf which you’ll be able to track in our dashboard.

Most streaming platforms have different timelines as to when music delivered to them will go live.

Once submitted, our team will review your submission to ensure it complies with the various guidelines set out by different streaming platforms. If there are any issues – our team will be in touch on what changes are needed or why your release was rejected.

For certain platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and YouTube Content ID – our team will review your submission to make sure you have exclusive rights to the entire track/instrumental. For example, if you have a leased or non-exclusively licensed beat – these platforms will not accept your release.

Precise sends our partners reporting and payments on a monthly basis. We typically report royalties three months after the sales date. Since every platform reports to us on different schedule, this ensures that the relevant reports have been received for each payout period.

For example, royalties generated in the month of January would be paid out at the end of April.

Most streaming platforms pay royalties using a pro rata model. This means all subscription and advertising revenue is pooled together each month, and payouts are distributed based on an artist’s share of total streams on the platform. 

For example your music accounted for 1% of all streams in a given month, you receive approximately 1% of the total royalty pool for that period. These pools are different for each territory and subscription type.

• Total number of streams your music generates
• Subscription type (paid vs ad-supported listeners)
• Your share of overall platform streams during the payout period
• Listener location, as rates vary by country. Countries with higher subscription and advertising rates would generate more, (e.g a stream in the United States would typically pay more than India)

Some platforms, like SoundCloud use a fan-powered royalties model, which differs from the traditional pro rata system used by most other platforms.

Instead of pooling all revenue together, fan-powered royalties distribute an individual listener’s subscription or advertising revenue only to the artists they actually listen to. This means an artist is paid directly based on engagement from their own fans, rather than competing with total platform-wide streams.

If you’d like to learn more, please check out the below articles;

Spotify: Loud and Clear

Apple Music Insights: Royalties
Dissecting the Digital Dollar

Typically, your music (or any other updates) should go live on most platforms within a day after you have submitted it.

As a Preferred Provider with Spotify and other platforms, Precise has expedited delivery speeds across key platforms.

For optimal results on new releases, we recommend uploading your songs to our portal at least three to four weeks before your desired release date – which gives streaming platforms editorial teams enough time to review your song and potentially place it on their curated playlists which we assist with.

As your trusted partner, we wanted to take a moment to warn you about some deceptive advertisements we’ve recently seen for illegitimate music promotion services.

Third parties that promise playlist placements or a specific number of streams in exchange for compensation are likely using illegitimate practices without your knowledge. These services can threaten your hard work, resulting in the potential withholding of streams or royalties, or even complete removal of your catalog from streaming services.

Our streaming partners work diligently to ensure streams are legitimate, meaning they reflect genuine user listening intent. If a service finds that you (or a third party hired by you or on your behalf) have boosted play counts through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means (digital bots, “click farms”, payment for placement on playlists, etc.), the service may permanently remove your entire catalog.

If you’re in the market for a music promotion service, make sure to do your research before you hire them.

• artists.spotify.com/artificial-streaming
• artists.spotify.com/help/article/third-party-services-that-guarantee-streams
• artists.spotify.com/blog/what-is-artificial-streaming-the-latest-episode-of-the-game-plan-explains

Precise takes action to investigate any music or clients that receive artificial streams, up to terminating and taking down any delivered releases. Any penalties charged by Spotify to Precise will not impact any artists who did not release the applicable violating tracks.