Most music distribution today is fully automated. A track is uploaded, a form is filled in, and within days the release is live on streaming platforms worldwide, without a single person listening to it, checking who uploaded it, or confirming the rights actually belong to the account that pressed submit.
Nebula does not work that way. We review every submission that reaches our platform in-house before it goes anywhere. This article explains why we made that choice and what our review actually involves.
The Problem: An Open Pipeline Attracts The Wrong Traffic
The democratization of music distribution is one of the best things to happen to independent artists. Anyone can release music globally without a label deal, and the cost has fallen close to zero. But the same open pipeline that serves genuine artists also serves people with no interest in music.
Streaming royalties are, broadly, a shared pool: money paid by listeners and advertisers is divided among the streaming platforms. That makes the pipeline a target. Uploading large volumes of low-effort or machine-generated audio, re-uploading other people’s tracks under new names, and generating artificial streams against that content are all ways to claim a share of royalties that should flow to working artists.
Every fraudulent stream is paid for out of the same pool that funds real music. The cost of weak submission standards is not abstract. It lands directly on the artists who create genuine value and the fans who support them.
Why This Matters More Than It Ever Has
The Role Of The DSPs
Digital service providers (the streaming platforms themselves) receive an enormous volume of new tracks every day. At that scale, no platform can manually vet what arrives at its door, so the industry has pushed responsibility upstream. DSPs increasingly penalize the distributors that deliver fraudulent or infringing content: releases are removed, royalties are withheld, and distributors with poor track records face consequences across their entire catalog.
For an artist, this changes the calculation. The distributor you choose is no longer just a delivery service. It is your reputation at the platform level.
If your distributor waves everything through, you share a pipeline with bad actors, and when platforms act against that pipeline, legitimate releases can be caught in the sweep. A distributor that reviews submissions properly is not adding friction for its own sake; it is protecting every artist on its roster.
The Role Of ISRC Codes
The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) is the identifier that follows a recording everywhere it goes. It determines how streams are counted, how royalties are attributed, and how a recording is recognized across all platforms and territories.
When ISRCs are assigned correctly, money reaches the right rights holders. When they are duplicated, recycled, or deliberately manipulated, royalties are misrouted, and manipulating identifiers is precisely how some bad actors divert income from recordings they never made.
This is why submission review has to happen before a release is delivered, not after. Once a recording is live with a bad identifier attached, unwinding the damage means takedowns, disputes, and months of delayed royalties. Getting the identity of the recording and the identity of the person behind it right at the point of submission is the cheapest moment to get it right.
The Solution: Review At The Source
The industry is responding on several fronts: platforms are refining how they detect artificial streaming, and identifier standards are being enforced more strictly. Nebula’s contribution is where we have the most control: the submission itself. We are not a pass-through. Music is art, and we think of ourselves as the gallery — and a gallery does not hang everything left at the door. It knows the artist, verifies the work, and stands behind what it shows.
That standard matters even more on Nebula than at a conventional distributor, because our model connects artists with fans who back their releases. When fans put money behind music, the music and the person behind it have to be real.
Here is what our in-house process involves.
Identity Verification (KYC)
Every artist on Nebula verifies their identity before we move money. Know-your-customer verification is standard in finance and still rare in music distribution. Still, the logic is the same: you can’t pay royalties to an identity that hasn’t been verified. For genuine artists, this takes a few minutes. For bad actors, it removes the single asset their model depends on: anonymity.
An operation built on uploading stolen or spam content at scale cannot survive with a verified legal identity attached to every account and every payout.
Content Recognition With Audible Magic
Audible Magic screens every submission, using the content-identification technology used across the industry to fingerprint and recognize recorded music. Each track is checked against a vast registry of existing recordings before it is delivered anywhere.
If a submission matches a recording already registered to someone else, it is stopped at the gate, not flagged months later by a takedown notice after royalties have been misdirected. This protects original rights holders and equally protects our own artists: the catalog you sit alongside on Nebula has been through the same screen you have.
DRM Protection
Music submitted to Nebula is protected before it is ever exposed to an audience. Digital rights management protects tracks from being ripped, copied, and re-uploaded elsewhere, which matters most when music is available to fans ahead of a wider release. Unreleased and early-access music is exactly what leak-and-re-upload operations target, so we protect the files themselves, not just the pages they sit on.
How Do We Detect Bad Actors?
Technology screens content; detecting the people behind bad submissions takes more than a fingerprint match. Our review looks at the account as a whole: whether the metadata is consistent with the claimed artist, or whether the catalog makes sense.
A brand-new account submitting a large back-catalog of polished recordings looks very different from an artist releasing their first single. Whether verified identity, rights claims, and payout details line up, and whether behavior on the platform matches how genuine artists actually work. Signals that do not add up route the submission to human review rather than automatic rejection, because edge cases go both ways: real artists sometimes have unusual histories, and sophisticated fraud can look superficially clean.
The combination — verified identity underneath, fingerprinting on the content, and human judgment on the pattern — is what an automated pipeline cannot offer.
Summary: Quality Control Is How You Value Music
Music distribution at scale created a genuinely open door, and an open door needs someone paying attention to who walks through it. The stakes have risen: DSPs now hold distributors accountable for what they deliver, and the ISRC system that routes royalties works only when identifiers, and the identities behind them, are verified at the source.
Nebula handles submissions in-house because our model demands it. Artists on Nebula distribute their music, keep ownership of their masters, and build a base of fans who back their work and share in its success. A form of music funding and co-ownership that only functions when every release is genuine.
Identity verification, Audible Magic screening, DRM protection, and dedicated bad-actor detection keep it that way. It is more work than waving submissions through. We think the music and the people who make and back it deserve it.