Artists, Labels & Publishers: What's the Difference

Artist, Label, and Publisher at a glance

What is a label?

A label in Velveteen is the owner-of-record for releases. Every release must belong to a label. This is a DSP requirement, not an arbitrary rule. When your music appears on Spotify or Apple Music, a label name is part of the required metadata. Velveteen models this accurately rather than hiding it.

The label is the name-of-record on your releases: what appears on DSP store pages as the releasing entity. Royalties are allocated directly to individual shareholders based on each track's split. Revenue is not pooled at the label and then redistributed. For an independent artist with a 100% split, the practical result is the same: all revenue flows to you.

Structurally, a label owns a roster of artists and a catalog of releases. Anyone with label-level access in Velveteen can see and manage all artists and releases under that label, unless their permissions are scoped more narrowly. This makes the label the natural administrative home for a catalog.

What is a publishing house?

A publisher controls the composition: the written song, the underlying melody and lyrics, as distinct from the recording of it. When you release a track, there are two copyrights in play: the master recording (owned by the label) and the composition (owned or administered by a publisher). They can be held by the same person or by entirely different parties.

In Velveteen, the publisher entity appears in track-level composition credits. DSPs use this metadata for mechanical licensing: the licensing framework that governs streaming and download royalties on the songwriting side. If a song has multiple songwriters with different publishers, each composer/publisher pair is listed as a credit on the track. No percentage split is stored in Velveteen. Ownership percentages are managed outside the platform.

You do not need a publisher entity to distribute a release. If you leave composition credits unpopulated, the release goes out without them. Adding a publisher is most important when you want DSPs and downstream licensing bodies to have accurate data for royalty routing.

If you're independent

Most artists on Velveteen wear three hats. You wrote the song (publisher). You recorded it under your name (artist). You own the master and are releasing it yourself (label). Velveteen represents each hat as a separate entity because the music industry treats them separately. Creating all three takes a few minutes and you stay in complete control of each.

1. 1

   Create your label

   Name it whatever you want to appear on store pages. This is the entity that owns your catalog. You can always rename it later. On free accounts, Velveteen assigns a default label automatically. Custom label names are available on paid plans.
2. 2

   Create your artist

   This is your performing name: the one listeners search for. Artists you create belong to your account automatically; there is no separate step to attach an artist to a label. If you have side projects or aliases, each gets its own artist entity. On label accounts, label admins automatically have access to artists created under that account.
3. 3

   Create a publisher (optional)

   If you want publishing credits on your tracks (for royalty collection or just accurate metadata), create a publisher entity with your name or the name of your publishing company. Add it to track credits when you upload.

Managing a roster

If you run an actual label, releasing music by multiple artists, the same structure scales up without friction. One label entity sits at the top. Each artist you sign or distribute gets their own artist entity under that label. Their releases attach to those artists, and the whole catalog is visible at the label level.

Access control follows this hierarchy. A label manager can see everything. An artist can be given access scoped only to their own releases. They won't see other artists on your roster unless you grant it explicitly. This matters when you're working with artists who should manage their own metadata but not your full catalog.

There's no limit on how many artists a label can hold, and artists aren't restricted to a single genre, release type, or output pace. The label is simply an organizational and ownership container. How you use it depends on how your catalog is structured.