Text Formatting and Language Guide
In order to provide optimal content to our partners efficiently we must conform to partner content formatting and style guides. Please carefully study and understand the following:
In order for your release to be accepted by the Digital Service
Provider once delivered, we summarize below the most common and
important guidelines. There are many more but we will only touch on the
most common ones. Adhering to these guidelines is necessary to ensure
that content is easily discovered and presented accurately to help
eliminate user confusion and complaints. Following this style guide will
help ensure that content goes live on all digital service providers and
will reduce the effort and time needed for corrections.
These must be followed 100%. If you have any doubts or questions please create a ticket and we can help further understand.
Title Capitalization
For English content, titles must not be in all capitals, all lower case, or random casing. Proper formatting is Title Capitalization in which the first letter of each word is capitalized.
Example (errors in red):
RELEASE TITLE – Incorrect, All Caps
release title – Incorrect, All Lowercase
Release title – Incorrect, sentence casing
Release Title – Correct
*Spanish and Portuguese content can choose either sentence or title casing
**Swedish, French and Italian follow sentence casing
***German content follows sentence casing AND the nouns are capitalized
****Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian albums and track titles should be submitted in a sentence case format.
Foreign Languages
Spanish, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese
These languages do not have to have the English translation. Translations are OPTIONAL for these languages. If you do not want translations to show up on sites instead of the Spanish or French language then DO NOT
fill out the English Translation field. You can use transliterated
(phonetic) or English translations if you wish. Do not put the same text
in the title and the translation field. Swedish, French and Italian
follows sentence casing while Spanish can follow either sentence or
title casing.
Slavic
Languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian that is
considered Slavic languages must use the native Cyrillic text in the
title field and the literal English translation in the translation
field. Do not use Phonetics or transliterated text for Slavic
languages. Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian albums and
track titles should be submitted in a sentence case format. This also
applies to Greek content.
TRANSLATIONS
FOR THIS CONTENT ARE ONLY REQUIRED BY ITUNES. IF YOU WISH TO SEND NON
TRANSLATED CONTENT OF THIS LANGUAGE THEN YOU WILL NEED TO CREATE 2
RELEASES. ONE FOR ITUNES ONLY THAT HAS TRANSLATIONS AND ONE FOR ALL
OTHER SITES NOT ITUNES THAT DOES NOT HAVE TRANSLATIONS
Arabic
Album titles, track titles, and artist names must be in Arabic or
Farsi, in the title and name fields for local content. Use the
transliterated (phonetic) version of the artist’s name in the English
translation fields.
Korean content
no longer allows side-by-side translations. The title must be in the
Korean and English translation fields in literal English translation. No
phonetics.