It WORKED. I found a workaround to CHANGE YOUR ARTIST NAME on APPLE MUSIC in 2024!
As you may know, Apple’s new (crappy) policy is to outright refuse and do nothing about artist name change requests. I know it’s a bit tedious for streaming services to do, and you certainly shouldn’t allow to change your artist name willy nilly all the time. BUT that being said, every other streaming platform does this without any issue, so why is Apple such a pain about this?
If I were a bigger artist, would they listen to my requests? Probably.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because I found a way to stick it to the man, which is Apple in this case.
The Workaround
I use Distrokid so the guidance is based around that service but this should work for other distribution services.
Basically what you want to do is re-upload your track ONLY on Apple Music. This is to avoid duplicating your tracks on every other streaming service where you name has already been changed. However, you want to do this with very slightly different metadata and under your new artist name.
As an example, I re-uploaded my track Stupefied using the exact same audio, but adding a cheeky doodle on the artwork as well as saying it is a “special version” of the track (the Special Apple Version :D)
Alongside this, do not forget to specify you never released any track under this artist name on Apple Music for the first one you re-upload. This ensures that Apple Music is forced to create a new page with your correct artist name.
This does mean your existing releases will be listed under your old artist name and duplicated under your new artist name on Apple Music. But I’d rather have that than them not showing under my correct and updated artist name at all.
It Works!
That’s it. It works, and as far as I could find, all the guidance currently available online is outdated and doesn’t reflect the fact that Apple doesn’t accept artist name changes anymore.
So as far as I know, this is the only possible workaround as of today.
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