ACME IDEA CORP

Featured, “with,” and side artist — which credit is which, and what each costs

08 · · Español

A featured artist and a “with” artist are the same thing to the machinery: a named guest, delivered in a guest role, never marked as a primary artist. A side artist is different in kind — a session performer with a fee and a credit, but no billing. The three words come out of two systems, display roles at the stores and payment classes in royalty law, and the systems do not consult each other. Every credit argument you have ever watched was two people standing in different systems, using the same word.

  • Stores take a guest two ways: Apple Music’s Featuring or With role, or Spotify’s featured-artist role in the artist fields. A guest is never a primary artist.
  • A side artist is a session musician or background vocalist: credited as a contributor, paid a fee, no artist billing.
  • US law splits noninteractive digital royalties 50% to the recording’s rights owner, 45% to featured artists, 5% to nonfeatured performers — and SoundExchange pays the featured share directly.
  • Canada splits neighbouring-rights royalties equally: performers 50%, makers 50%, with session performers included in the performer half.
  • Spotify and Apple Music streaming pays the rights owner only. No credit moves that money without a written agreement.

What is a featured artist, officially?

A featured artist is a named guest delivered in the track’s artist fields with a featured role, and never marked as a primary artist.

Both stores say so in writing. Apple’s Music Style Guide requires that special guests “be given the Featuring or With role” and that anyone holding one “must not be marked Primary.” Spotify’s is the mirror: main performing artists are credited as main artists on all content, and featured artists are listed separately, each in their own field.

“Officially” is the operative word. The role is a field, the field is set by whoever owns the upload, and everything downstream — billing, profile placement, one entire class of royalties — reads the field.

Is a “with” credit different from “feat.”?

Apple Music defines With as a second guest role, formatted exactly like feat.; Spotify’s style guide has no “with” credit at all.

Apple’s own worked example is “That Old Black Magic (with The Dave Brubeck Trio)” — lowercase, in parentheses, kept in English even on a localised release, under the same rules as feat. It is the tuxedo spelling of the same job: heritage billing for duets, orchestras, and standards records.

Spotify’s guide does not know the word. Its collaboration vocabulary — “meets,” “vs.,” “x” — is confined to version fields, with everyone credited as a main artist. A “with” on Spotify is just title text, and titles are exactly where Spotify says featured names must never go.

Beneath both stores sits DDEX, the delivery standard releases actually travel in, and its display-artist roles come down to two that are alive: MainArtist and FeaturedArtist. What a store does with the difference is, in DDEX’s own telling, the store’s business. There is no With in the schema. There is no side artist in it either. The words are billing; the roles are plumbing.

So pick feat. unless you are matching an existing catalogue’s style, and stop litigating the preposition. A prominently billed guest is a featured performer whichever word the title wears; royalty law does not read punctuation.

What is a side artist?

A side artist is a session performer — a hired musician or background vocalist who is credited on the recording and carries no artist billing.

The unions say side musician. The statute says nonfeatured. The deal is the oldest one in the building: a fee for the session, a contributor credit — Musician, Background Vocalist — and no share of the master unless a piece of paper says otherwise.

The Sistine ceiling had a crew — plasterers, gilders, grinders of blue. Name one. That is the side artist deal, four centuries before anyone put it in a rate card.

The trap is not the fee; it is the silence. A session player nobody papered is an open authorship question — who owns the master walks through why, and the fix it prescribes is a one-page assignment signed before or at the session. Credited is not paid, and paid is not settled. The classes are independent, which is the entire reason the next two sections exist.

What does each credit pay in the US?

United States law splits noninteractive digital royalties four ways: 50% to the rights owner, 45% to featured artists, and 5% to nonfeatured musicians and vocalists.

“Directly” is SoundExchange’s own word, and it is doing heavy lifting. The featured share does not route through the label, the distributor, or you. Put a featured guest on the track and the statute reassigns 45 percent of one royalty stream to them — no negotiation, no signature, nobody’s permission. That is the one place the law writes the split for you.

That four-way split covers noninteractive digital services — SiriusXM, Pandora’s radio side, webcasters. Spotify and Apple Music are the other kind, interactive, and interactive pays the sound recording’s rights owner through the distributor, full stop. A featured artist’s cut of streaming is whatever a written agreement gives them. No agreement, no cut.

A credit is not a contract. The paper is the contract, and without it the deal is whatever the two of you remember — which, the day real money shows up, becomes two fucking different memories. Write the guest’s percentage down before release day. And if the guest also wrote on the song, that is the other system entirely: the composition has its own default split and its own page.

What does each credit pay in Canada?

Canada’s Copyright Act splits neighbouring-rights royalties equally: performers receive fifty percent in aggregate, and makers receive fifty percent.

The reach is wider than the American regime. Canadian commercial radio, the CBC, satellite and pay audio, and music in venues all pay under Re:Sound’s tariffs. United States AM/FM, meanwhile, is — in the words of SoundExchange’s own advocacy page — “the only form of radio today that doesn’t pay performers for their work.” The same spin pays the recording’s performers north of the border and pays them nothing south of it.

The performer half is not a label pass-through. Performer collectives — ACTRA RACS, Artisti — are paid by Re:Sound and pay performers directly, and the half belongs to performers as a class: featured vocalists and session musicians both collect.

Claiming it — registering, eligible repertoire, which collective takes you — is its own piece for another morning. Today, hold one fact: in Canada the session player is in the statute, not in the fine print.

Which credit do you choose at upload?

Mark the release’s own artists primary, mark a named guest featured, and credit session players as contributors, never as artists.

Then price in what the featured choice buys and what it costs. On Spotify, the guest’s copy of the credit lives in Appears On — the section Spotify defines as the albums and compilations you contributed to — not in their main discography. And the release does not surface in the guest’s Spotify for Artists at all: recordJet’s support documentation says it plainly — not displayed, and “therefore … not pitchable by the feature.” The playlist pitch belongs to the primary artist alone. If you are the guest, know that going in.

The workaround everyone reaches for — marking the guest primary so the song lands on both profiles at full billing — is the one move both style guides prohibit in the same breath they define the roles. A guest role must not be marked Primary. The stores wrote that sentence down so nobody has to discover it from a rejection email.

The punctuation — where feat. sits on Apple, what Spotify strips from titles, which words are banned outright — is its own minefield with its own page: what metadata distributors actually reject. One spelling of every artist name, everywhere, and let the distributor translate between the stores that disagree.

Decide the credit when you book the session, not in the upload form. The form is where the decision gets recorded. It is a terrible place to make it.

FAQ

Does a featured artist automatically get royalties?

One royalty is automatic in the United States: SoundExchange pays featured artists 45% of noninteractive digital performance royalties directly. Interactive streaming — Spotify, Apple Music — pays the rights owner, and a featured artist collects only what a written agreement gives them.

Is “with” different from “feat.” for the money?

No. Royalty law recognises featured and nonfeatured performers; it does not read the preposition in the title. Apple Music treats With as a formatting variant of the same guest role.

Do session musicians get streaming royalties?

Not from Spotify or Apple Music by default. Session performers collect from the US nonfeatured pools through the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund, and in Canada through the performer half of neighbouring-rights royalties.

Do featured tracks show on my Spotify profile?

Yes — under Appears On, not in your main discography. The release is pitchable to playlists only from the primary artist’s Spotify for Artists.

Sources

This is not legal advice, and statutes, tariffs, and style guides change — the linked pages are the living documents. The percentages here are the statutes’ and the organizations’ own, current as of the date above. If real money is riding on a credit, talk to a lawyer in the relevant territory before the release goes up.

Keeping the register

CatalogTracker keeps every party’s role on the track itself — Main Artist, Featured Artist, Guest Artist, and the contributor credits beside them — so which credit everyone holds is an answer you look up, not an argument you reopen. In development for iPhone.