How to change your artist name

Let's say you've been delivering music under a particular artist name, you already have a few releases out on music platforms and now you want to change this. But how do you get this updated on Spotify and Apple? You can actually action this yourself from your Make Waves account. To quickly explain how this works: you're going to change your artist name inside your Artist catalogue and then send an update / redelivery for all of your releases, so the music stores will receive the new artist name. See our detailed steps below.

When you are logged into your Make Waves account, head to the Artists tab, click on the three dots next to the artist you wish to change, and click on Edit.

For Spotify, you want to change the artist name but keep the artist identifier the same. So then you only have to write the new artist name in the field above and keep the artist identifier the same. Don't touch anything else.

After you have saved your new artist name, this will update automatically for all the releases this artist is part of. So then, the next step is to send an update / redelivery for each release. Please follow these steps in order to send a successful update for every release:

Please find our separate guide here, explaining how to send an update.

For Apple - a brand new artist page has to be created with the new name, they aren't able to update the existing artist page. So all of your releases will sit on a new artist page, and you will get a new artist identifier.

In order to create a brand new artist page on Apple, you will need to go back to the artist you wish to Edit and de-select the option that says "This artist has an existing profile on Apple Music". We're basically removing the existing artist identifier that was initially set up, so that a brand new artist page will be created. See the screenshot below.

After you have Saved the changes, you want to send an update to the stores for only one release first. When this is processed on Apple's side, a brand new artist page is created and you will get a new artist identifier in your Make Waves account. When this is done, you can then proceed with sending an update for your other remaining releases. These will then end up on the correct new artist page, which is what we want to achieve.

It usually takes a couple of days for things to show correctly on the stores. Ideally, Spotify keeps your artist identifier the same and only changes the name on your page. But we've seen this go differently in the past as well. Sometimes they create a brand new artist page with the new name and have the releases moved to this new page as well. All historic data will stay the same, so the play count won't be impacted, or any other element on your artist profile. If things aren't showing correctly after a few days, please reach out to us and we can take a look.