Common questions

IMF starts with the credits and release details published by streaming services. It brings your recordings from all of those services into one catalog, then checks names, works, and credits against trusted records from the U.S. Library of Congress, which has the highest quality of authoritative headings. Every detail keeps a note of where it came from, and your finished catalog is delivered in each listener’s supported language.

Nothing technical. But each service only knows its own catalog, and none of them has a reason to build something that walks a listener over to a competitor. That is why the big services give you a profile or a channel inside their own walls, but never an app of your own. IMF hosts no audio, pays no per-play royalties, and competes with none of the services it links to — which is exactly why it can do the thing they won’t.

Your distributor knows what you sent through it, and it does that job well. What it cannot see are the recordings you played on for someone else’s release, and it has no reason to show a listener a version of your work sitting on a rival service. IMF starts from the streaming services themselves rather than from your delivery history, so the catalog it builds covers your whole career, not just the part that happened to go out through one pipe.

The catalog is published, not pulled live from the streaming services. That is deliberate: every entry has been matched, checked, and cleared before a listener ever sees it, and your new recordings reach the app when IMF publishes the next catalog update. The space between updates belongs to you. Your own social feeds and concert calendar run live inside the app, so an announcement, a new video, or a concert date reaches your audience shortly after you post it.

Nothing. No fee, no membership, no sign-up screen standing between a curious listener and the music. Plenty of branded fan apps are built on membership platforms and ask for a registration or a subscription at the door, and a door like that turns away the casual listener first — the one who was going to become the devoted one. IMF asks nothing of them, and the music opens on the service they already use.

One app under your name, holding your recorded career in one place. It follows the way the music is really built — composer, work, movement, performance, release, and where that recording sits on each service — so your listeners can browse by conductor, ensemble, or instrument instead of guessing at a search box. When they press play, the app hands them to their own service.

No. The play happens on the streaming service, counted and paid exactly as it is today. IMF hosts no audio, pays no per-play royalties, and takes nothing out of the stream. What it hands the service is a listener who already knows which recording they want, which is the best kind of traffic a service can get.

Yes, and that is the part most products skip. Translating menus and buttons is the easy half. IMF also carries work titles, movement names, genres, instruments, and the names of performers, ensembles, and orchestras into the listener’s language, with the original spelling kept alongside. Listeners using Russian, Bulgarian, or Serbian in Cyrillic see your name in Cyrillic and each work under the title used in their language. You choose which of the 13 supported languages to include.

There’s no industry standard for auditing music metadata accuracy — DDEX and ISRC cover format, not correctness — so nobody in this business can honestly quote you a certified number. What IMF guarantees instead is a rule: it never publishes a match it isn’t certain of, and anything questionable receives a human review before it reaches a listener.

IMF cannot put a recording back on a service that pulled it, and it won’t pretend otherwise. What it can do is keep your catalog entry alive and keep pointing at every other service that still carries that recording, so one platform’s decision stops being the whole story. The app carries your name in the Apple and Google stores — it is not a shelf inside the service that dropped the recording.

The cleaned catalog, the corrections, and the translations belong to you. IMF will provide you with an exported complete copy in an open file format, so nothing is locked in a shape only IMF can read. Music data companies larger than this one have gone dark before, which is why you can take your catalog with you from day one instead of negotiating for it later.

No. Language and regional coverage are separate. IMF provides metadata for Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, and RUTUBE that is intended for use worldwide. IMF provides Apple Music and TIDAL metadata that is intended for use only in the United States, regardless of which languages the app and catalog use. This is a moving target: streaming services change their regional catalogs, and future versions of IMF applications will expand metadata and link support beyond the United States. Even where IMF supports a region, each streaming service controls whether a particular recording is available to a listener.

Yes, and that is usually the half nobody can find. IMF looks at the recordings sitting on the services rather than at what you delivered, and matches them to you by name and credit, so guest and session work lands beside your own releases. Each entry carries who else was there: the conductor, the orchestra or ensemble, the other soloists, the instrument, the date, and the venue.