How to Migrate Your Music Catalog to a New Platform

Switching distribution platforms is one of the more involved operational decisions a label or distributor can make. Get it right and you move everything cleanly, with no data loss and no disruption to your releases. Handle it poorly and you end up with missing metadata, degraded audio files, confused artists, and disruption to your active releases.

This guide is for labels, distributors, and music companies that are seriously considering a platform switch. It covers what to audit before you commit, what a thorough migration actually includes, and what to watch for at every stage. At the end, it covers how a fully managed migration service removes most of this complexity from your plate.

Step 1: Audit Your Catalog Before You Move

Before you talk to any migration team or new platform, you need an honest picture of what you have. That picture shapes the scope, timeline, and cost of any migration.

Catalog Size and Active Releases

Count your releases. More importantly, separate your active releases from your inactive or archived ones. Active releases are live on stores and generating royalties. Those need the most careful handling during a migration.

Know how many tracks are attached to those releases and confirm you have the original audio files. Missing source files before a migration becomes a bigger problem during one.

Metadata Quality

Run a check on your metadata health. Look for:

• Releases missing ISRCs or UPCs
• Tracks with incomplete credits (composers, publishers, performers)
• Releases with territory settings that need review
• Inconsistent or missing release dates

Metadata gaps that exist on your current platform will follow you to the new one unless they're cleaned up before or during migration. A good migration team will flag these issues, but knowing about them upfront saves time.

User Accounts and Roster Structure

List every user account that needs to migrate: admin staff, label managers, and artist accounts. Understand how they're organized. If you have sub-labels or tiered roster structures, document that hierarchy so it can be replicated correctly on the new platform.

Royalty and Financial History

This is important to understand before you start. A catalog migration moves your releases, tracks, artwork, audio, and user accounts. It does not move historical revenue statements, past royalty reports, or payout records. Those stay tied to your previous platform.

Before you migrate, export every historical statement and royalty report you need from your current platform. Download them, archive them, and make sure your finance team has copies. Once you leave a platform, getting historical financial data out of it becomes harder over time. Treat this as a pre-migration task, not something to deal with later.

Step 2: Understand What a Full Migration Covers

A migration is not just moving audio files. A complete catalog migration covers every layer of your distribution operation. Here is what should be included:

Users and Accounts

Every admin, staff, and artist account should transfer with roles and permissions intact. If your current platform has user-level settings, those should carry over. If they don't, your team spends the first weeks after launch resetting access and recreating configurations.

Artists and Labels

Your full roster structure needs to migrate, including any sub-labels or groupings. This isn't just a list of names; it includes the relationships between accounts, the metadata associated with each artist, and the organizational hierarchy you've built over time.

Releases and Tracks

Release metadata is the core of your catalog. A proper migration moves all of it: titles, track listings, credits (writers, composers, performers, producers), ISRCs, UPCs, release dates, genre assignments, territory configurations, and rights data.

Partial metadata migration is a significant problem. If credits don't transfer, you may have royalty collection issues downstream. If territory settings don't carry over, releases may go live in the wrong markets.

Artwork

Cover art should migrate at full resolution. Compressed or downscaled artwork is a quality issue that affects your artists' releases and your platform's credibility. Confirm explicitly that your migration service preserves original file resolution.

Audio Files

Same principle applies to audio. High-resolution audio files should migrate at their original quality. A migration process that re-encodes or downgrades audio is introducing a quality loss that cannot be undone.

Step 3: Watch for These Common Migration Problems

Even with a capable migration team, certain issues come up often enough to warrant specific attention.

Metadata Gaps After Transfer

Test your metadata on the new platform before going live. Spot-check releases across different time periods, different sub-labels, and different release types (albums, singles, EPs). Errors tend to cluster, and one gap usually signals more nearby.

Delivery Confirmation Status

If your releases are live on DSPs when you migrate, you need to understand how delivery status carries over. Releases that are actively delivered to stores shouldn't be treated as new submissions during migration. Your migration team should map existing delivery statuses so stores don't receive duplicate submission requests or removal notices.

Earnings After the Migration Date

Royalties earned from streams and downloads after your catalog is live on the new platform will flow through your new distribution setup. Royalties earned before the migration date will be reported by your previous platform on its normal schedule. Make sure your team and your artists understand this split clearly so there is no confusion when statements arrive from two different sources during the transition period.

Missing Source Files

If some of your releases are on a current platform without the original source audio (because they were uploaded years ago by someone who no longer works there, for example), you need to find those files before migration. Your new platform will need the audio to deliver to DSPs.

Step 4: Choose a Managed Migration vs. DIY

Once you understand the scope of your migration, you face a practical choice: run it manually or use a managed migration service.

What a Manual Migration Looks Like

Manual migrations involve exporting data from your current platform (assuming it allows exports), cleaning and restructuring that data to match the new platform's format, re-uploading releases, re-entering metadata, and uploading audio and artwork. For a catalog of any significant size, this is months of staff time, with meaningful risk of errors at every step.

What a Managed Migration Service Covers

A proper managed migration service handles everything: data extraction from your current platform, format transformation, loading into the new environment, staging review, and go-live.

Audicient supports DDEX, CSV, and JSON import formats for catalog migration. For platforms that don't export in a standard format, Audicient's team works with custom data exports and handles the transformation on their end. You don't need to reformat anything yourself. Your team's involvement is limited to scoping conversations, reviewing the staging environment, and signing off before launch.

Audicient offers exactly this. Audicient's team has migrated catalogs from FUGA, Revelator, SonoSuite, Believe, and other platforms, handling the full transfer of users, artists, labels, releases, tracks, artwork at full resolution, and audio at full quality. No data loss, no quality degradation, no manual work for your team.

After migration, you're running a fully white label distribution platform that includes a built-in helpdesk, smartlinks, custom pages, subscription plan builder, global payouts, royalty accounting, bulk uploads, and a REST API, all starting at $59/month.

Getting Ready to Switch

The steps above give you the framework, but the honest summary is this: catalog migrations are complex enough that trying to manage them manually is rarely worth it for catalogs of any real size. The risk of errors multiplies with every release, and the cost of those errors, in staff time, artist trust, and disrupted releases, adds up fast.

The better path is a migration partner that has done it before, has a defined process, and takes ownership of the outcome. If you're evaluating platforms and want to understand what a migration from your current setup would involve, Audicient's team will scope it with you before you commit to anything.