RLIAB Beta Weekly Development Update
This week was heavily focused on polishing ReleaseCore, improving catalog accuracy, and making RLIAB feel more consistent across desktop and mobile.
What we improved
- New navigation experience — The RLIAB sidebar received a major quality-of-life update with collapsible navigation, hover expansion, favorites, improved tool discovery, cleaner “View All” pages, and better credit-cost visibility.
- Better mobile release editing — We introduced mobile-specific navigation and controls instead of squeezing desktop interfaces onto smaller screens, along with a redesigned save bar and more adaptive page layouts.
- Unified Aura styling — Continued work across the artist portal to standardize typography, spacing, controls, cards, dialogs, buttons, and responsive behavior so RLIAB feels like one cohesive application.
- Contributor & credit improvements — Contributor requirements were strengthened around distributor standards, collaborator selection was simplified, common collaborators are easier to find, and Songwriter is no longer selected automatically.
- Publishing splits now follow duplicated credits — When track credits are duplicated during bulk editing, their associated publishing splits can now be carried over as well.
- Smarter back catalog imports — Imports now better recognize multiple artists listed together, preventing names such as “Artist A & Artist B” from being incorrectly created as a single new artist.
- Improved artwork management — Cover art controls are being consolidated into one dedicated experience for uploading, replacing, selecting gallery artwork, or requesting discounted artwork design through East Rock.
- Release type editing — Release types such as Single, EP, and Album can now be managed directly from the Release Details area in the admin editor.
- Expanded analytics imports — ReleaseCore analytics now includes support work for Sony Music Publishing reports alongside the existing royalty and analytics import pipeline.
- Better artist activity tracking — Artist and Alumni classification now takes recent join activity into account so newly registered RLIAB artists are not incorrectly shown as inactive before releasing music.
- Platform reliability — We continued reducing Shopify theme-extension size, tightening validation, and resolving deployment and portal regressions introduced during recent UI work.
Key bug fix
Artist counts on Discover were previously including every contributor attached to the catalog, including producers and other non-performing roles. The count now includes only primary and featured artists, providing a much more accurate representation of the artists in the RLIAB community.
These changes are part of our ongoing work to make RLIAB simpler, faster, and more reliable as we continue expanding the platform.