Content Run does not accept

Most of what gets held on Run is a fixable mistake: a missing document, a title that needs rewriting, a file that has to be re-exported. This article is about the other kind, the material Run does not distribute at all.

The list is short and the reasoning behind it is the same each time. A distributor that ships impersonation and stream-farming gets its whole catalog throttled or removed by the stores, and every artist releasing honestly pays for it.

Never accepted

• Impersonation. Releasing under another artist’s name, or a name picked to be confused with it. It steals an audience someone else built.
• Profile hijacking. Delivering to a store page you do not control, or claiming a page that belongs to someone else. This is how a catalog gets taken over, and it is the complaint we act on fastest. Connect your real pages first: see store pages.
• Karaoke versions and backing tracks of someone else’s song. There is no version of this we distribute, cleared or not.
• Soundalikes. Recordings made so they can be mistaken for another artist’s work, including titles built around “in the style of”.
• Type-beat exploits. Titles, artist names or credits built to ride another artist’s search traffic rather than to name the record.
• Material made to inflate streams. Silence, test tones, functional noise, bulk near-identical tracks, and releases cut to game a minimum-play threshold. These take money out of a royalty pool everyone else is paid from.
• Undisclosed voice clones and deepfake vocals, and any use of an identifiable person’s voice, name or likeness without their explicit written consent and a signed agreement. See the AI policy.
• Anything you do not have the rights to. Recordings, compositions, samples or artwork you do not own and have not cleared, a catalog you no longer control, and licences that expired or were never granted. See rights and ownership.
• False credits. A featured artist, producer or writer credited on a track they are not on.

Illegal and harmful content

Separately from the rights questions, some material is refused for what it is:

• Child sexual abuse material, in audio, in artwork, in a title, in any form. There is no review conversation here: the account is closed and the material is reported to the authorities.
• Content that incites, threatens or glorifies violence, or that attacks or dehumanises people on a protected ground.
• Terrorist content, and material produced for or promoting a proscribed organisation.
• Material that is illegal where it would be distributed, or that a court has ordered removed.

Music has always dealt with violence, drugs, sex and anger, and describing something is not calling for it. What is acted on is content that incites harm or dehumanises people, not a dark song.

The practical ones

These are the everyday refusals. They are not usually bad faith, and most of them are one edit away from shipping.

• Misleading titles and keyword stuffing. Store or playlist names in a title, chart claims, promotional lines, invented featured artists, genre spam, and version tags (“remix”, “live”, “sped up”) that do not describe the recording. Metadata rules covers how to write a title that ships.
• Artwork carrying web addresses, social handles or store branding. No domains, no QR codes, no “@yourname”, no store marks or “available on” text, no pricing or promotional copy. These are the stores’ own rules and a reviewer applies them, so a cover can be technically perfect and still come back. See artwork requirements.
• Non-musical content submitted as music. Undeclared spoken word, ambient noise, test tones and generated filler. A spoken-word or field-recording release is fine when it is what the release actually says it is.
• The same recording resubmitted as a new release to reset its position, and reused or deliberately wrong barcodes and ISRCs. See ISRCs and barcodes.

What happens

Where the problem is fixable, the release is held or rejected with the reasons written out, and you fix it and submit again. Common rejection reasons is the long version of those findings, and editing and resubmitting is how you reopen a release.

Where it is not fixable, the release does not ship. A live release that should never have shipped is taken down from every store it reached, and the stores remove it on their own schedule once the request arrives.

Repeated or deliberate breaches stop being a release matter and become an account one: suspension, closure, and a refusal to work with you again. Opening a second account to get around a limit, a rejection or a suspension is itself a breach. Where the law requires it, or where a rights holder pursues a claim, we cooperate with stores, rights holders and the authorities.

We tell you what happened and why, unless the law prevents us, and if you think a decision is wrong you can say so with your evidence. Reporting infringement or impersonation covers that route.

The full text is published: Acceptable Use Policy sets out what may be distributed at all, and Anti-Fraud Policy covers stream manipulation, impersonation for gain and what happens to earnings connected to them.