Title formatting: the casing, language and script rules
42 · · 14 min read · Español
There is no universal title case. A title is judged by the casing conventions of its own language — both stores publish them, per language — and the language field, the accents and the script are rules of their own, any one of which can bounce a delivery. The rejection email quotes none of this. The answer key underneath it is public, and shorter than you think.
- Titles are capitalised by the rules of the title’s language. Spotify’s guide states the principle in one sentence, and Apple publishes separate casing rules per language.
- The English rules at the two stores are near-identical: title case, the same lowercase word lists, and a capitalised first and last word — including inside parentheses.
- The metadata language field declares the language of the metadata, not of the audio. Apple sets metadata language at album level and audio language per track, with nonlinguistic audio flagged zxx.
- A translation never rides inside a title. Apple bans side-by-side translations in metadata; a translation is delivered as separate localised metadata under its own language code.
- Non-Latin scripts stay native: Cyrillic titles are never transliterated in the native field, Chinese ships in both Traditional and Simplified, all accents must be included, and emoji are banned from metadata outright.
Which language’s rules is your title judged by?
The title’s own language decides: Spotify applies the capitalisation rules of the language, and Apple publishes separate casing rules per language.
Spotify’s Metadata Style Guide opens its casing section with the whole principle in one sentence: “Titles should be capitalized according to the capitalization rules of the language. For titles written in English, the following rules apply.” Apple’s Music Style Guide is built the same way, and says so where almost nobody reads: its English casing section “applies to titles in English only,” and separate sections carry Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Cyrillic and Chinese, each with conventions of its own.
Sit with what that means. The title case you learned once — capitalise the big words, lowercase the little ones — is not the rule. It is one language’s rule, and applying it to a French or Spanish title is exactly as wrong as ignoring it on an English one.
The enforcement is the part you already know: distributors check these pages before delivery, and a metadata rejection is a failed test against a public answer key. That piece’s field table gives title casing one cell — casing that ignores the language’s own rules. This piece is what is inside the cell.
What are the English title-casing rules?
English titles take title case at both stores: lowercase articles, conjunctions and short prepositions, and a capitalised first and last word — parentheses included.
The two rulebooks disagree about featured artists, version fields and the shape of a parenthesis. Here they agree nearly word for word. Spotify’s lowercase list: “a, an, and, as, but, for, from, nor, of, or, so, the, to, yet.” Apple’s is the same fourteen words. Both add the same second rule: prepositions of four letters or fewer — at, by, in, into, off, on, onto, out, over, up, with — stay lowercase, except when the word is part of a verb phrase or working as another part of speech. That exception is why the guide’s own examples capitalise the way they do: In the Still of the Night, but Waiting for the End.
Then the rule that decides most edge cases. Both stores: always capitalise the first and last word of a title — and the first and last word inside parentheses. Apple’s example is the one to remember, because every part of it looks wrong and is right: (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman. The A is capitalised because it is the last word inside the parentheses. For English, Apple adds, words before and after a dash, a slash, or a colon are capitalised too.
Two smaller rules close more support tickets than they should. Apple: “These rules also apply for purposely misspelled words” — the guide’s own examples are In da House and It’s fo’ Realz, casing rules intact, spelling untouched. And a short list of words that look small but are not articles or prepositions, so they stay capitalised: Are, If, Is, It, Than, That, This.
For anything the section does not settle, Apple’s guide says this, in writing: “For general cases not addressed in this guide, refer to The Chicago Manual of Style.” Somewhere in the delivery pipeline, your single is being copy-edited by the University of Chicago.
Can a title be stylised — all caps or all lowercase?
Apple’s guide says titles should not be in all capitals, all lowercase or random casing; Spotify says the same unless specified by artists.
Apple’s §3.20 is one flat sentence: “Titles should not be in all capitals, all lowercase, or random casing.” Spotify’s version carries the door you are looking for: “Unless specified by artists, titles must not be in all capitals, all lowercase, or random casing” — and its first-and-last-word rule has a matching hinge, “unless the official title is spelled otherwise.” The styling can be the title. It has to be specified, not typed and hoped for.
Here is the honest gap: neither store publishes how an artist’s styling intent travels with a delivery. There is no published field for “this lowercase is on purpose.” So do the two things that are actually in your control — put the intended styling in writing to your distributor when you deliver, and use it character-identical everywhere the title appears, every release, every store. Consistency is the half of the rule the machines can check, so consistency is the half that protects you. This is our recommendation, owned as ours.
The same instinct on the artist name is a different rule with a different owner — stylised names, and the comparison that catches them, are the name piece’s subject.
What if the title is not in English?
Spanish and Portuguese take title or sentence casing, applied consistently; French, Italian, Swedish and Scandinavian titles take sentence case; German capitalises every noun.
Apple’s Spanish and Portuguese rule starts with a choice nobody expects a style guide to offer: “you can decide on either title or sentence casing, as long as the casing is consistent throughout a given album.” The mechanics that come with it are exact — capitalise the first word in parentheses or brackets, capitalise after a dash or a slash, lowercase after a colon except for series and medleys — and each language gets a closed list of the only words allowed to be lowercase when title casing is used.
French, Italian, Swedish and the Scandinavian languages take sentence case: capitalise the first word and the words the language itself capitalises, and stop. French carries one more requirement that reads like trivia and rejects like a rule: “A space before and after punctuation marks made up of two parts is required for French content.” That space before the exclamation mark in Un monstre à Paris ! is not a typo. It is French typography, and the guide demands it.
German takes sentence case and capitalises the first letter of every noun, because German capitalises nouns — Was ihr wollt, but So ist das Spiel. Titles in the Cyrillic alphabet are submitted in sentence case. None of these is a translation of the English rulebook. They are different conventions because they are different languages, and the store guide follows the language rather than flattening it.
What does the language field actually declare?
The metadata language, not the audio language: both stores define the field by the language the metadata is written in.
Apple, at album level: “the appropriate language must be set in the metadata at the album level. Language codes must match the language of the metadata, not the audio” — and the stated reason is rendering, “to ensure that accents appear correctly.” Spotify, same rule, own words: “Language code should match the language of the metadata, not the audio.” Two rulebooks that agree on little agree on this, in the same seven words.
The audio has its own field. Apple: “The appropriate audio language must be set in the metadata at the track level. Language code(s) must match the language spoken or sung in the audio.” And the sentence after it answers a question every instrumental artist has asked a form: “Nonlinguistic content must be flagged ‘zxx’.” There is a code for “this track is not in a language,” and it is zxx.
So the map has three layers, not one: the metadata language, per album, describing the spelling; the audio language, per track, describing the singing; and localisations, which are the next section. You can sing the whole record in Portuguese and file it, correctly, under English. The field never listens to the record.
Can the title carry its own translation?
No — Apple bans side-by-side translations in metadata, and a translation is delivered as separate localised metadata under its own language code.
The habit this kills is the bilingual artist’s reflex: Canción (My Song), one field, two languages, everybody served. Apple’s rule is five words longer than the habit: “Do not use side-by-side translations in metadata. Use only one language in each entry or localization.”
The translation goes in a localisation instead. Apple’s worked examples are Hebrew and Arabic albums delivered twice over — the native title in the native-language field, the romanised title in the English localisation, each complete in its own language. Localisations “enhance the discoverability of your content,” and Apple asks for them “for all languages you have available, unless you want the metadata to appear in the primary language in all territories.” Optional, in other words — but the option is a parallel set of fields, never a parenthesis.
Spotify’s machinery is the language code itself: “For content with multi-language metadata, the appropriate language codes must be provided for both the original and the translated metadata.” And its version-field rules close the side door twice over — translations “must not be included in the version field,” and again not in a version title. A translation is metadata with its own address. It never rides in the string.
How do non-Latin scripts and accents have to be delivered?
Native script in the native field: Cyrillic titles are never transliterated, Chinese ships in both Traditional and Simplified, and supported languages must include all accents.
Apple’s Cyrillic rule assigns every version of the title a home: “Content in languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet should not be submitted with transliterated titles. Use Cyrillic in the native title field, English in the English localization field, and transliteration in the available phonetic field. Localizations and transliterations are not required.” Chinese content goes further — delivered in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, one in the primary language field and the other in a localisation. Japanese phonetics take Katakana or Hiragana; other languages romanise theirs; and phonetic fields have their own small prohibition, straight from the guide: no symbols — “stars, hearts, and so on.”
Accents are not decoration, and the guide treats dropping them as an error: “Supported languages must include all accents.” German gets the strictest version — all characters common in German orthography must be used, and digraphs are banned: Ihre größten Erfolge, never Ihre groessten Erfolge. On the Spotify side, accents and casing “must be delivered accurately in the xml” — a clause whose consequence lands on the artist page, where the name piece already lives.
Emoji get one sentence and no appeal: “Do not use emoji in titles, artist names, lyrics, or other metadata.” That is Apple. Spotify’s guide publishes no emoji rule and no script or transliteration mechanics at all — its machinery is the language code, and its casing section simply defers to the language. Read the silence as silence, not as permission: a rule that is not published is not a door that is open.
What to do before the next delivery
Set the metadata language per album and the audio language per track, pick one casing per album, and deliver accents, scripts and localisations complete.
- Set the metadata language from the spelling, not the singing. The audio language is its own field, per track — and an instrumental is zxx.
- Pick the casing convention of the title’s language and hold it for the whole album. The per-language rules above are the answer key; consistency is the rule every checker can enforce.
- Deliver every accent, in the native script. Transliteration has its own field. A dropped accent is not a simplification; it is a different string.
- If the styling is deliberate, say so in writing to your distributor — and then never vary it by a character.
- Keep translations out of the string. One language per field; the other language gets its own fields.
That covers the next release. For the catalogue behind it — every title typed in a hurry since the first upload — the audit checklist reads the metadata layer back in the order failures propagate, and titles are one of its twenty-four checks, not the scariest one on the list.
FAQ
Do generic titles like “Track 1” or “Untitled” get rejected?
Apple’s guide bans them unless they are real. Titles must be accurate and formatted correctly, and generic titles such as Track 1, Track 2, or Instrumental are not allowed “unless they are the actual titles of the tracks.” A song genuinely named Untitled is deliverable; a session export that never got named is not.
Why did an ampersand break the delivery?
Because the delivery is an XML file, and some characters are part of the code. Spotify’s guide lists the characters that must be entered as entity codes, with its own example: the artist name Echo & the Bunnymen must be entered with the ampersand encoded. A distributor form usually does this for you; a direct feed has to do it itself.
What do you set when a song mixes two languages?
For the audio, deliver the languages that are actually sung — Apple’s rule writes “Language code(s)” in the plural. The metadata language still follows the language the metadata is written in. Neither store publishes a casing rule for a title that mixes two languages, so the honest practice is to follow the convention of each part and keep it consistent across the album.
Does fixing a title’s casing need a new ISRC?
No. A casing or spelling correction is a metadata update sent by your distributor; the recording itself is unchanged, and the same recording keeps its code. A new code enters the picture only when the audio changes — a different edit, a different version — and that decision has its own rules.
Sources
- Apple, Apple Music Style Guide — §3.20 no all-caps, all-lowercase or random casing; §3.21 the English title-case rules, the lowercase and uppercase word lists, first and last word including in parentheses, dash/slash/colon, purposely misspelled words, and the Chicago Manual deferral, all scoped “to titles in English only”; §3.22 all accents required and the German digraph ban; §3.1 generic titles; §1.6 metadata language at album level, matching the metadata and not the audio; §1.7 audio language per track and the zxx flag; §1.8 localisations and the Hebrew and Arabic examples; §1.9 the side-by-side translation ban; §1.10 the emoji ban; §11.1–11.6 the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Swedish, Scandinavian, German and Cyrillic rules, including the French two-part punctuation spacing; §12.3 Traditional and Simplified Chinese; §12.4 phonetic fields and the symbols ban.
- Spotify, Metadata Style Guide (v2.3) — the §26 principle that titles are capitalised by the rules of the language; §26.3 the stylisation rule and its “unless specified by artists” hinge; §26.5–26.7 the English lowercase list, the preposition rule, and first-and-last-word capitalisation with its official-title carve-out; §26.1 consistent abbreviations; §26.2 accents and casing delivered accurately in the xml; §24 language codes matching the metadata, not the audio, for original and translated metadata both; §7.2 and §8.8 translations banned from version fields and version titles; §27 the XML entity codes and the Echo & the Bunnymen example.
Store rules change, and the ones here are quoted as at the date at the top of this piece; the linked guides are the living documents and both were read end to end that day. Your distributor’s form may present these fields under different names — the rules underneath are the ones above, and where a distributor’s checker is stricter than either guide, the stricter rule is the one that bounces you.
Keeping the register
One exact title and one declared language per release, kept where the next delivery reads them, is the whole defence against most of this page. CatalogTracker keeps languages, territories and genres on the release beside the dates, the UPC and the P-line, with version and recording type on each track, and a completeness meter that reports how many of a release’s fields are actually filled in rather than assumed. The casing you settled on two albums ago is the sort of thing a register remembers and a Tuesday does not. In development for iPhone.