Here is what nobody selling you a distribution plan says out loud: there is no machine-to-machine pipe that moves a catalog from one distributor to another. It does not exist.
DDEX, which means Digital Data Exchange, writes the XML standards every distributor uses to deliver music to streaming services. It does publish a catalogue transfer standard. Read who it covers: “a relinquishing record company, an acquiring record company and a DSP.” Then read the next line: “This standard in its current iteration does not seek to support catalogue transfers that involve distributors.”
So when anyone advertises a catalog “migration,” what happens underneath is a re-delivery. Your releases get submitted again, from a new account, to the same stores.
That is the normal mechanism, not a flaw. It only becomes a problem when the re-delivery carries the wrong numbers. For the standards detail behind that three-party gap, read why the DDEX catalogue transfer standard stops at label-to-label deals. This piece is the practical version: what to do, and in what order.
The Two Codes That Decide Whether Your Streams Survive
Every re-delivery lives or dies on two identifiers.
- ISRC means International Standard Recording Code. It identifies the recording. It must stay the same.
- UPC means Universal Product Code. It identifies the release package. It does not have to.
The ISRC rule is not opinion. The IFPI’s International ISRC Agency is explicit: “ISRC should not be assigned if an ISRC has previously been assigned to the same recording. The existing ISRC should be used.” The code stays identical across releases, formats and licensing changes.
Changing your delivery company does not create a new master. Same audio, same ISRC. That is the hook Spotify and Apple Music use to link a fresh delivery back to the streaming history, playlists and artist page you already have.
The UPC is the opposite case. A barcode labels a product issued from one distributor’s prefix block. A re-delivery from a new account legitimately gets a fresh barcode, and carrying over someone else’s prefix is a reliable way to land in a DSP conflict queue.
What InterSpace’s Transfer Catalog Tool Actually Does
In your InterSpace Distribution dashboard, the Toolbox card is called Transfer Catalog. It is a metadata importer that builds your drafts, so the boring half of a migration stops being an evening of typing. It is not an API handshake with your previous distributor, because per DDEX above, no such handshake exists.
What it fills in for you
Paste your Spotify or Apple Music artist link. The tool reads public catalog metadata and returns your releases: titles, tracklists, release dates, artwork references, label and credit data, and any publicly registered ISRCs.
Tick the releases you want. Each lands in your Drafts flagged previously released, so our QC reviewers treat it as a re-delivery rather than a debut.
Two guardrails run first. An ownership filter strips the compilations and guest features where you are not the primary artist, which is why a raw lookup returning 157 items can resolve to the 47 releases you control. A match confidence check warns you when an artist name is ambiguous, because name collisions across a global catalog are common and silent.
You also tick an ownership attestation. Imports are rejected without it, the same rights posture that governs every other field in our delivery pipeline.
What you still do by hand
This is the honest part.
- Upload your masters. The importer never touches audio. Drafts arrive with empty audio slots and you attach your WAVs.
- Confirm artwork rights. We reference the artwork. We do not assume you cleared it.
- Check every ISRC. Public coverage is uneven, and independent and African catalogs in particular come back with blank ISRC fields, which is metadata debt arriving at the worst possible moment. A blank you failed to fill is the one thing that genuinely costs you stream history. Paste them from your old distributor’s export.
- Expect a new UPC. We deliberately leave the source barcode off and issue a new one at delivery.
The Order of Operations
Sequence matters more than speed. Deliver first, take down second.
- Import your catalog as drafts.
- Attach masters, verify every ISRC against your old distributor’s export, submit.
- Wait for each release to appear live under the new delivery.
- Only then request takedown at your previous distributor.
Taking releases down before the replacement lands is the most common way artists open a gap, and a gap is where royalties go missing. Ari Herstand sets out the same order at Ari’s Take.
Start With One Release
You do not need to move a hundred releases to test this. Import one. Upload the master. Confirm the ISRC carried. Watch it go live and check your stream count came with it. Then move the rest.
Keep your own copy of every identifier while you still have access to the old account. Owning the masters is not the same as controlling the catalog, and a switch is the moment that difference shows up.
Open your InterSpace Distribution dashboard, go to Toolbox, and select Transfer Catalog. If your catalog is big enough that you would rather send a spreadsheet than paste a link, contact the label desk and we will run the import with you.
