Content Run does not accept

Run refuses impersonation, rights infringement, stream manipulation and the illegal or harmful material listed below. These rules apply whether the music was made with AI or without it.

If your release was returned for a correctable file, metadata or clearance problem, use Common rejection reasons to find the fix. This article explains the content boundaries and consequences.

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. Connect the pages that belong to your artist: 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

For a fixable problem, Run returns the release with written reasons. Read those reasons, reopen the release, make the correction and submit again. Common rejection reasons explains the usual findings.

For prohibited material, the release does not ship. If it is already live, Run requests removal from every store that received it; each store processes that request on its own schedule.

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.