Deliver a music video with full credits and rights metadata, and generate the Art Track that lets a recording collect on YouTube even when no video was ever shot. Lyric videos, social teasers and per-video revenue are part of the same account as your music distribution.
Video releases
The video side of a release is where most independent catalogues quietly leak money. Not because the videos are bad — because the recording is on YouTube in some form, earning, and nobody has claimed it properly.
All four sit in the same catalogue as your audio releases, share the same approval workflow — draft, submitted, in review, approved, delivered — and appear in the same revenue reporting.
YouTube pays for music mainly through Content ID, the system that recognises a recording inside any upload and routes the revenue to whoever owns it — including uploads by other people. Content ID works on video assets. A recording with no video attached has nothing for the system to pay against.
That is what an Art Track is for: a static video of the cover art, the exact length of the recording, delivered as a proper release rather than an upload. Every large distributor generates them, and an artist without one simply does not collect the YouTube share of their own release — while fan uploads of the same song carry on earning for somebody else.
It pays out on uploads that contain your recording. It does not police the whole internet, it cannot claim a live cover somebody else performed, and disputes take time. What it does reliably is collect from the fan uploads, reaction videos and compilations that would otherwise earn nothing for you.
Credits and rights
The fields below are what decide who gets paid, where it can be watched, and whether a claim survives a dispute. They are part of the release form, not an afterthought.
| Group | Fields | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Title, subtitle, version, category, genre and sub-genre, language, explicit flag, release date | How the video is filed, filtered and surfaced — and whether it is age-restricted in the wrong markets. |
| People | Primary artists, featuring artists, director, writer, composer, music director, producer, editor | Credits follow the video across platforms and settle arguments later. The director credit in particular is routinely lost on independent releases. |
| Rights | Label, rights management, reporting owner, repertoire owner, territories | Who owns the video, who reports on it, and where it may be shown. Wrong values here are how revenue ends up somewhere else. |
| Codes | Video ISRC, audio ISRC, UPC, YouTube video ID, VEVO channel | The video and the recording inside it are two identifiers. Keeping both correct is what links the video's earnings to the right track. |
| Discovery | Keywords, description, thumbnail, visibility | What YouTube search and suggestions have to work with. A thumbnail and keyword list are the closest thing a video has to a hook. |
A music video carries its own ISRC, separate from the recording it contains. Filling the audio ISRC into the video field — a common mistake — makes the two objects indistinguishable in reporting, and the money follows the confusion.
Made for you
The artwork, the master and the synced lyrics are already on the server. That is everything a renderer needs, so these are a button rather than a budget.
Your cover art held for the exact length of the recording, at the resolution YouTube wants, so Content ID has an asset to pay against. The dullest video you will ever release, and often the one that earns.
Words appearing as they are sung, over your artwork, in 16:9 or 1:1. Text is shaped through HarfBuzz — so Bengali conjuncts and matras join correctly instead of being drawn in codepoint order, which is what simpler tools do and no Bengali reader accepts.
Thirty seconds, square, with an animated waveform over the cover — sized for Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, starting from the moment of the song you pick rather than always the first bar.
Video rendering and cover generation run on our own hardware, so an unreleased record is not uploaded to a third-party service to be processed. Long renders run as background jobs you can walk away from.
The money side
Video earnings arrive from a different place than streaming royalties, in a different format, on a different schedule. They land in the same ledger here: the same daily trends, the same monthly statement with the lines behind the total, the same withdrawal to a bank account, mobile wallet or Payoneer.
If you are weighing whether the video side is worth the effort: a recording with an Art Track collects from uploads you did not make and cannot control, indefinitely, for the cost of pressing a button once. Very little else in distribution has that shape.
Video distribution FAQ
It is the delivery of a music video, with its credits, rights ownership and identifiers, to the platforms that pay for video — principally YouTube, including through a VEVO channel. It is a separate release from the audio, with its own ISRC and its own reporting.
A video consisting of the release artwork held for the length of the recording. YouTube pays for music through Content ID, which needs a video asset to attach a claim to, so an Art Track is how a recording with no filmed video still collects.
No — an Art Track is enough, and it is generated for you from the artwork and master you already uploaded. A filmed video earns from its own views on top of that.
You can, but an ordinary upload is not a delivered release: it does not carry the rights metadata, it does not register the asset for Content ID, and it does not appear in the official music catalogue. The two are different things, and only one of them collects from other people's uploads.
The highest-quality master you have, in a standard container, at 16:9 with square pixels — 1920×1080 or better. Supply the thumbnail separately rather than letting a frame be picked for you.
They are delivered as videos and earn as videos, but platforms treat them as a different version — that is what the version field is for. Filling it in honestly avoids a lyric video competing with the official one in search.
Yes. Territories are selected per video, so a release covered by a regional deal can be limited without affecting the audio release.
Yes — per video, alongside per-track audio revenue, on the same daily trends and the same itemised monthly statement.
Generate Art Tracks for the catalogue you already have live, then deliver the filmed videos properly — with credits, rights and identifiers that survive a dispute.