what's up guys it's tom welcome back to the lab
welcome back to another video welcome back to
my life today i want to tell y'all about some
changes i have been making so for the longest time ever since
social media started i have been tom dupree iii on everything at tom
dupree iii has been my handle on literally
everything it works out well because by adding the three i's at the end
i am in fact third tom dupree it means the handle is pretty much available
everywhere so i've used it on everything and i use
the third to differentiate myself from my dad and from my granddad
from the south it's a thing anyway two years ago
or really 18 months ago when i started releasing
music as an artist i created the profile on spotify as
td 3 tdii and at the time i thought to myself well this will be
kind of like a clever artist's name to test music and test this whole thing out
and kind of see what's what i thought that maybe eventually i would
change everything else to be td 3 because i
thought it was a cooler artist's name than tom dupree iii
i just figured i would figure it out later well
now it's later and i have decided to figure it out
so instead of changing literally everything
where i am present on the internet to td3
i decided to just change the one place where i'm td3
to tom dupree iii today what i want to share with you
is changing my artist's name on spotify and other platforms how i went about it
and exactly what happened as a result now before we dive into
all of the detail and there is a lot of detail into this i promise you
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experiment and share all of the stuff that i uncover about
how to be a musician in the digital age and how to promote yourself
moving on i changed my artist name on spotify it's a pretty big deal
if you read anything on any digital distribution
platform most of them tell you that it's not even possible so
it's definitely a thing it's definitely a question that gets asked i have not
seen it covered very much maybe i'm not looking hard enough maybe it's not
something people do very often or maybe most people think it's just not possible
so here are just a few things that platforms will tell you
about changing your artist name if you're curious and want to try to do it
tunecore when you go to their help section
says apple and other store partners do not allow an artist name to be changed
once a release has been paid for and delivered if you are changing your
artist name you can use it for future releases but stores want the artist name
to remain the same on past releases in short no
if you go to cd baby they say we are not able to make changes to an artist's name
after a release is finalized if you want to change your artist name
you must cancel the title and resubmit with a new fee and barcode okay
again no spin-up says in answer to the question can i correct a mistake or
change my release in any way after has been distributed
no unfortunately not when you upload your music you have the opportunity to
review and edit before the payment page so please
double and triple check everything then etc etc
so basically no everybody says no you can't do it everybody tells you that if
you want to change your artist name you have to just
delete all your songs from spotify and basically start from scratch
that's not what i did it is possible to change your name
when i wanted to change my name from td3 to tom dupree iii
i had music distributed through two different platforms distrokid
and amuse i love both of them if you follow the channel you know that i have
done a couple of distro kid sponsored videos i love distrokid
so i started with them once again unfortunately they said
can i change my artist name sorry about this but we cannot process
artist name change request at this time etc etc
their answer to that is no where i didn't
do enough research on this is i didn't ask i
took their faq just like all these other ones
to heart and i didn't inquire about it now i don't i haven't distributed
music through spin up and cd baby and tune core so i didn't
have any reason to ask them but i did have music on district
and i didn't ask i'm pretty sure that if you ask
they'll do it they just tell you no to dissuade you from
trying so that everybody doesn't ask all the time but i will say this if you're
on distrokid ask first because i think they probably
will honor that request but i didn't do that what i did do
is i went over to amuse and saw what they had to say about it
changing artist names changing an artist name is more tricky than it seems
the data change means streaming services and stores need to create a completely
new artist page meaning that you lose your current one
as well as your monthly listeners and followers
it also makes it more difficult for your listeners to find releases
if you still want to do it here's what you have to do
boom the opportunity is there no previous releases in this case you can
simply create a new account and another email in the app and you
will use it to upload your new releases that's not me
already released music that's me in some cases we can help you
update the artist name please submit a request to support and we'll get back to
you with the next steps at this point in time i have a window
there is somebody who will give me the option to change my artist name
cool what i did first is i consolidated my entire catalog
over to a muse to make the change i put them in one place that way when the
artist name change happened potentially everything
would be in one place and it would change it on everything and i wouldn't
have to worry about stuff being kind of littered all over the place and
then i went to submit a request and i filled out the form
all of this information change and release
and i sent them an email with all the information
which looked like this hi i would like to change my artist name please i'm
currently listed as td3 my initials ny great little spelling area there tom
in stores i would like to change it to my full name
tom dupree iii with the t d p and three eyes capitalized
i've included the release ids for all active releases and would like all of my
work move to the new name if possible please let me know if there's anything i
can do to facilitate this transition sent them that they replied with this
hi there thanks for reaching out changing the artist name is not as easy
as it seems this is what will happen if you changed
your artist name the stores will create a completely new artist page meaning
that you would lose the current one you would lose all your monthly
listeners and followers since there's no way to transfer them to the new page
it would make it more difficult for your listeners to find your releases
those streams and other play stats usually remain on your previously
released tracks this can't be guaranteed all of your playlist play placements
would be lost are you sure you want to change your
artist name you are 100 committed if you decide to change it i replied yes
i do and i sent that original email on july
20th last monday as of last monday that's when the process got started i've
recognized that this is just about as big of a change as you can make when it
comes to your spotify profile so it takes time in getting the ball
rolling on this i will say the biggest issue was submitting my artwork
updated with my new artist name on it all of my artwork had td 3 on it at the
time and i had to update it to say tom dupree
the third and the reason that was such a big deal is because you have to have
000 by 3 000 pixel artwork or bigger and it has to be high res and sending
that via email you have to send each one one at a time
i sent them all in a link a dropbox link and 24 hours
later they told me that wouldn't work so i sent it all in a zip file to
download they told me that wouldn't work so then i had to send them all
individually and this took about four days of going back and forth to get that
worked out so that was the culprit for the loss of
time but by friday they had submitted the change
and then on sunday the change started to take effect
what i want to do is show you exactly what the update looked like in the app
what my name looked like and then go to spotify for artists and show you what
changed over and what did not so here is how my name now looks in the
muse app formatted correctly
t-o-m-d-u-p-r-e-e-i-i-i with you'll note the p in my last name
capitalized which is how it's spelled and
as stupid as it may sound is important to me so that's how it looks in the app
unfortunately it did not populate correctly
in spotify in spotify it looks like this with the p lowercase
now it's a bit of a bummer but i did submit
a request in the same thread to the same person who's been helping me
told her about the error and she said not a problem we'll fix it
and they submitted it immediately she said it could take a couple of weeks to
update i have no reason to believe that it won't it just might take a little bit
of time but for all intents and purposes
everything showed up correctly after two days of the submission
actually going through from them to stores which is dub now spotify for
artists my old name td3 here is what it looked
like when it got shut down so
all of my streams stopped all my listeners
stopped everything went to zero my followers stayed the same
as of shutting down td3 i had 348 followers
with tom dupree the third i now only have
three which is a bummer i lost all my followers but
if you watch this video here you'll see that i've finally figured out a way to
grow my following on a consistent and reliable basis
and i got from about 75 to 350 in a matter of like a month so
i'm not really worried about losing that number in fact one of the reasons i
wanted to make this change now is because the follower count was so low
it's not like it's going to be a huge deal to rebuild that
my only concern is that of those 350 people
are they not going to be able to find me and i don't think so because
all of my music transferred over and is now in their catalog
still just as tom dupree iii and not td3 so they'll see that my artist name has
changed if my music has been saved in their catalog now here is
the cool part it's said that you can't guarantee
that the streams will be ported over but they were
as you can see in spotify all of my streaming numbers
are the same as they were all of my streams remain
as tom dupree the third as they were with td 3. so upload
which has 32 000 streams now has 32 000 streams on tom dupree the third
it ported it over if i had had to delete my profile and upload as a new
artist that would be zero so this is super dope that this switched over
and everything else is exactly the same and one thing that they said
i would lose which was all of my playlist placements which i was prepared
to accept totally cool is not the case i'm still on all of the
playlists that i was on pre-switch so the only
thing that has changed the only thing that has changed in changing my artist's
name from td3 to tom dupree iii is my
follower count my average monthly listeners and my name
that's it everything else has stayed the same now
it takes a few days to stagger along like the
name change happened first and tom dupree iii
didn't have anything under it and then it had all of the
albums under it and all the songs under it but all of the
top songs that are listed in spotify were still on td three and then
all of that moved over and now the only thing left on td three is average
monthly listeners and followers i'm willing to bet now this
doesn't happen this isn't a big deal i can grow the follower base
it's okay i know how to find my audience but i'm willing to bet
that at some point within the next couple of weeks
those 350 followers are probably going to
change from td3 to tom dupree iii and if that happens i'll report on that and let
you know that's it that's what happened when i
changed my artist profile on spotify i didn't think
it was possible i was actually bumming out pretty hard
because i've done such a good job i think of placing my brand everywhere
as my name in the same fashion across the board
and i didn't do it right on spotify and i was really worried that i was gonna
have to start over from scratch not that the numbers are like through the roof or
anything but all that work was going to go out
the window that i've put in for the past 18 months
and i'm really happy and relieved that i didn't lose all that
so changing your name on spotify is possible my advice is this ask your
distributor whoever you have your music distributed through
just ask ask first that is the number one thing i would advise i didn't do
that and i wish that i had everything worked out so it's really not
a big deal it's not like i lost anything but i did have
additional work in moving my catalog around which i guess i would have anyway
if i had moved it from a muse to district kid
and or vice versa which is you know i moved it from district kid to a muse if
i had moved it from a muse to distrokid i would have had the same amount of work
so whatever my advice is to ask your distributor ask if they can do it no
matter what the faq says because i'm willing to bet
it is possible most of them just don't want to do it but
if they tell you they won't amuse will probably they did for me i'm not saying
it's a guarantee they will but they did for me that was the one
place i found that that did it and it worked they did a great job of it
everything worked out the only thing i'm waiting for is the formatting change
which isn't their fault at all because as i said in their app my name is
correct it was a processing error on spotify and
apple music and a couple of other places most places it showed up correctly so
it's just a few stores that it didn't work and that's going to get updated
no big deal that's it that's what happened that's it for this video
uh if you want to change your artist name it can be done there is hope i
would only advise changing your artist name early on in
the game the only reason i did it now is because i had
under 500 followers i had 2 200 average monthly listeners my
profile my account is still very small and it made sense to do it on the small
stage before i continue to put in effort and time and
money into the momentum and the growing of myself as an artist which i'm
currently doing and figuring out how to do and i wanted to get this done before
i really hit the gas pedal so i would only do it if you're small or if you
have some sort of legal issue that it has to be done as a result of that's
it for this video i hope that helps if you do change your
artist name and you have luck with it let me know in
the comments if you have any questions about this
let me know in the comments i will be happy to answer as best as i can
and as always thanks for watching i'll catch you in the next one
peace