Once you’ve uploaded your products using the AWAL Uploader (check out our Catalogue Transfer Best Practices article) and the release date has passed, you’ll want to check that your catalog has successfully transferred before asking your previous distributor to take down the originals.
You can see that the delivery has been successful using our delivery report in the Catalogue tab on your Portal. You will also want to check on the digital music services themselves to confirm they have merged stream counts and playlist placements.
It’s easy to check this on Spotify (see below), but we’d advise allowing a day or so crossover where both products are online to allow time for stream merging to take place.
Provided the same metadata and assets for the whole release have been used, Spotify will merge the releases. The newer one (the AWAL version) will be hidden behind the original.
You can flick between the two using the button shown below:
Note: the 1+ more release button will only show if your release has transferred successfully. Spotify will recognize that there are duplicates live (the AWAL version and the version from your other label/distributor) and hide one of them.
To check your individual tracks have transferred successfully: when viewing any product that has the same track as the AWAL product, you should see the same stream count when hovering over the popularity bars on Spotify.
If stream counts have merged, this means your playlist placements are safe. You can go ahead and ask your previous distributor to pull down the original.
Apple doesn’t hide duplicate products in the same way as Spotify, so you should be able to see the extra release on your artist page or via search (if it hasn’t correctly mapped to your artist page, you can find out more about this here).
It’s important to keep in mind that Apple doesn’t transfer iTunes reviews or popularity over to the new product during catalog transfer. Apple Music playlist placements will also be lost in the transfer process.