Never Change Your Artist Name

TL:DR

f you want to change artist name, do yourself a favour and just start a new page for your streaming services and thank me later.

HAVING REGRETS

Note to self: NEVER CHANGE your artist name AGAIN. I am STILL struggling SO HARD to get the right artist name to show everywhere. Everything is broken.

I wish I had started a fresh page and not have had to deal with the insane FAFF I am dealing with right now…

It’s been WEEKS of back and forth with distribution services and streaming services, and they do the absolute *minimum* they can get away with to help.

Mostly YouTube And Apple Are A Pain With This

Apple straight up REFUSES to do anything about artist name changes since June/July 2023, so don’t trust any advice pre-dating that. I’m sure if you’re Drake or something they probably would, but whatever I guess. YouTube is better, but for some reason they updated my artist name BUT disconnected the music from my existing YouTube channel.

Also Distrokid Is Not Great At Dealing With This

So now I asked about three times at Distrokid that they please fix it, and I STILL have NOTHING. They answered me THREE TIMES with GENERIC and UNHELPFUL advice that had nothing to do with my actual issue. Like they did not even read my message.

Between this and the facelessness of streaming services, it’s got to be one of the most frustrating experiences I have had with support and ticketting systems…

I love Distrokid, but this is really annoying. I wish they would at least actually read my support prompt before sending me some random shit back, only for me to copy/paste them my message again. Like, surely this is a waste time for me and also for them.

Thankfully they were fantastic about every other issue I have had else so far, so I got a lot of love and patience for them.

But DAMN I hope this gets sorted soon.

Potential Workaround

I am trying a very cheeky way to get my own, and get my artist name changed on Apple no matter what their shitty policy is (sorry Apple, but it is a shit policy, and anyway what alternative do you give us than to find a workaround really?). Will report back if it works.

If it does work it will be called the “Screw You Apple Artist Name Change Method” 🙂