Before the release date
Deliver a music video to a record label.
Full bitrate before release, locked while it matters, handed over clean.
A label marketing team and an artist team both have to see the same cut, sign off on it in a way you can point to later, and receive a master that is ready to publish on a date nobody is going to move. Here is how that delivery is built, in order.
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By uncompressed.io · Updated September 2026
The shape of this job
A release date
that nobody is going to move.
A music video delivery is not a rough cut hunting for a buyer. The film is finished, the track is scheduled, and four constraints arrive at once. Get them straight before you think about a platform.
A date, already announced
The single has a release date and the video is attached to it. Every round of feedback is spending a day you cannot get back, so the approval loop has to be short and it has to be unambiguous about who still owes you an answer.
Two teams, one cut
Label marketing and the artist team both watch, and they are not looking at the same thing. Marketing is checking brand, logos, clearances and thumbnail moments. The artist team is checking the artist. Both notes land on the same timeline.
An approval you can point to
Somebody has to say yes in a way that survives the week. Verbal approval in a phone call is what produces the argument at 2am on release eve about who signed off on the version with the old logo.
A master, handed over clean
At the end of it the label takes delivery of a file and publishes it. That handover is a separate act from the approval round, and treating it as one thing is how the wrong export goes public.
Everything below follows that order. Who watches, what they watch, how the yes gets recorded, what happens on the day the embargo lifts, and what you hand over.
Step one
One link per person.
Two teams, one cut.
This is administration, it is dull, and it is the only reason any control further down this page is worth anything.
The arithmetic is simple. A watermark, a forensic mark and a view log all resolve to a viewing session. A session names a person only if exactly one person held it. Send one link to a label group address and you have converted a name into a crowd.
Music video rounds leak sideways more often than they leak outward. The people forwarding a pre-release video are rarely malicious. They are an assistant sending it to a colleague, a manager showing the artist on a phone, a coordinator dropping it in a shared folder so the social team can pull frames. None of that is sabotage and all of it destroys your ability to say who had the file.
So ask in writing before any link goes out: who inside your organisation will watch this. Then issue those people their own links. It removes the conversation that otherwise starts with “we only shared it internally”.
Write the list before you make the links
Name, company, role, and which team they sit on. This list is also your delivery record, so start it as a document you will keep rather than a note in a message thread.
Give each team what it needs to review
Distribution roles let a project hand different audiences different files, so the marketing team and the artist team can be served from the same project without one of them receiving a cut meant for the other.
Set the expiry to the approval window
The link should stop working shortly after the round it exists for. Reissuing one takes seconds; explaining a live pre-release link in October takes longer.
Record what went to whom
Version, date sent, expiry, recipient. When something goes wrong this document is most of the investigation, and it is the part that outlives whichever platform you sent from.
Step two
The label is approving a grade.
Send it at the bitrate you graded.
A music video is mostly light. Smoke, strobes, neon, skin tone, a black background with a single practical in it. Those are the exact things a delivery ladder spends its bits badly on, and the person approving your work is watching the result of that decision, not your grade.
Vimeo ladder figures are quoted from Vimeo's own help article, fetched 11 September 2026 and cited below; the article states that the bitrates listed for each resolution are a maximum. Honest framing: if the label only needs a tidy, embeddable, well-known player for a press page and nobody is going to ask about delivered bitrate, Vimeo is the sane answer and you should use it.
The practical consequence is narrow but it is real. When a marketing director says the grade looks muddy, you currently have two possible causes and no way to separate them: a genuine note about your work, or an artefact of the delivery ladder. Removing the second cause costs you nothing and it means the note you get back is about the film.
Step three
Put the yes on the record,
not in a phone call.
The version everyone agreed on and the version that went public should be provably the same version. That is the whole purpose of this step.
Versions sit in one place, so the third cut does not arrive as a new link with a new filename that somebody bookmarks by accident. Comments are attached to a timecode, which is the difference between “the logo looks wrong” and a note pinned at 1:42 where the logo actually is. And approval is recorded against a specific version, so what you have at the end of the round is not a memory of a call but a record that names a version and a person.
Two habits make that record useful. Never reuse a version number after you have changed a frame, even for a fix nobody asked about. And close a round before you open the next one, so an approval from the artist team on version three cannot be quietly inherited by version four with a different edit in it.
The three notes that arrive late on every music video
- A logo, a sponsor card or a clearance that marketing had not seen in context.
- A shot of the artist that the artist team wants changed, usually one frame range.
- An audio version question: clean, explicit, or a radio edit with a different length.
All three are cheap if they land against a timecode in the round and expensive if they arrive as a message the night before. Ask for them explicitly when you open the round.
Step four
What a link can enforce
and what it cannot.
An unreleased track attached to a picture is the leak a label actually cares about. Here is what each control does for you, stated plainly, including where it stops.
AES-256 at rest protects the stored file from anyone who reaches the storage rather than the link, and it does nothing about an authorised viewer who passes the video along. The Vault is a feature included on every plan, not a tier; what the paid plans change is storage and included team seats.
Then the part no vendor should be vague about. A phone in front of a monitor defeats all of it, on every platform, and no amount of feature list changes that. What these controls do is raise the cost of a casual forward, make a careless one attributable, and shorten the window in which either is possible. That is the honest ceiling, and it is still worth having on a pre-release track.
The full menu of screener controls, with what defeats each one, is in secure screener sharing. If journalists are getting the video before release as well, the embargo mechanics are in send a press screener before release.
Step five
Hand over the master,
then get it off your hot storage.
Delivery is a separate act from approval. Keep it separate, or the approval cut ends up being the thing that gets published.
The publishing file
The export the label's team will upload, in the codec and frame rate their destination wants. YouTube's own help states a maximum upload of 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less, so size is not your constraint here. Naming and version are.
The mastering file
The ProRes or DNxHR master, hosted for download rather than streaming. Label archives outlive campaigns, and this is the file they will ask you for in two years.
The record of the round
The approved version, who approved it, and when. Deliver it alongside the files rather than leaving it inside a platform, because this is the part that has to survive you changing tools.
Once the label has taken delivery, the project stops being a review job and becomes an archive. Hot storage is priced for files that stream, embed and get reviewed. A delivered music video does none of those things any more, and cold storage exists for exactly that moment: a cold master does not stream, embed or review, archiving frees the hot space immediately, and restores are size-verified.
$40
per TB hot, a month
For files that still stream, embed and get reviewed.
$20
per TB cold, a month
Cold storage is on the Max and Studio plans only.
20 GB
largest master the web dashboard archives
Larger masters move part by part through the macOS app.
One number to plan around
Honest framing
Plenty of videos
need none of this.
An independent artist putting out a video on their own schedule, with no label, no embargo and no marketing team, should send a private link and get on with it. The worst case is that somebody sees the video a week early, which is not a business problem. The whole apparatus above exists because a leaked pre-release track costs a label a launch, and if there is no launch to cost, skip it.
The friction is real and it is not free. Asking a label coordinator to install a native macOS application to watch a three-minute video will lose you some of them, and the ones you lose will not tell you why. Reserve the Vault path for the round that carries the unreleased track, and run the rest on a plain private link with one link per person, a short expiry and a document recording what went out.
Who genuinely needs the full programme: a video attached to a scheduled single release under an embargo, a round going out to more than a handful of people across two organisations, anything where the track itself is unreleased, and any label that has already been careless with something of yours. Everything else is a delivery, and the delivery mechanics are in deliver final video files to clients.
Questions
Frequently asked
Should the label approve the graded master or a compressed cut?
Send a viewing file that carries the grade. Browsers decode H.264, HEVC and AV1, so a ProRes or DNxHR master is not what a marketing director will watch in a browser; those are hosted here for download, not for streaming. The point is that the viewing file you export is the file that arrives. Our player streams the exact bytes you uploaded, with no transcode anywhere, so a platform ladder is not quietly re-encoding your grade before the person approving it sees it.
Can I stop someone at the label from screen recording the video before release?
Not on a browser link, on any platform. Capture blocking here belongs to the Vault, which is a native macOS review path, because that is where the operating system gives an application that control. It is not a property of a link you paste into an email. And a phone pointed at a monitor defeats every control every platform sells, permanently. Plan for attribution and for the contract, not for prevention.
The marketing team and the artist team both need to watch it. Do they share a link?
No. Issue one link per named person, including the assistant who opens it on the manager's behalf. The session watermark, the forensic mark and the view log all resolve to a session, and a session only names somebody if it belonged to exactly one person when you issued it. Nine people on one link gives you nine suspects and no way to narrow them.
Can I put one password on the whole campaign?
No, and that is worth knowing before you plan around it. A password sits on a video, one video at a time. There is no multi-video hub behind a single door here. If the label wants one password covering a whole campaign of assets, this is not the tool for that part of the job.
What happens to the link on release day?
Revoke it. The approval cut has done its work the moment the label has signed off and the public version is live, and a pre-release link still working three months later is exposure with no upside. Set the expiry to the approval window when you issue it, then revoke anything still live on the day the embargo lifts.
Where should the master live after the label has it?
Somewhere it is not paying hot-storage rates for a video nobody is reviewing any more. Cold storage on the Max and Studio plans is $20 per TB a month against $40 per TB a month hot, archiving frees the hot space immediately and restores are size-verified. A cold master does not stream, embed or review, which is exactly correct for a delivered job. The web dashboard archives masters up to 20 GB; larger masters move part by part through the macOS app.
Do I still need a signed document if the platform watermarks everything?
Yes. Every technical control on this page is a deterrent or a forensic aid. The thing that lets you do something about a pre-release leak is a signed document naming a person, the track, the embargo date and the consequence. The mark tells you who; the paperwork is what you do about it.
Let the label see the grade, not a re-encode of it
The Vault is a native macOS review path, and access to it is included on every plan, including the free Starter with 5 GB. Capture blocked, a session watermark carrying the viewer's identity, a forensic per-person mark, AES-256 at rest, short-lived links and a tamper-evident view log. What the paid plans change is storage and seats: Studio, the top plan, is $250 a month or $2,500 a year with 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold and five seats, and extra seats are $25 a month or $300 a year.
Sources
- 1.Guidelines for determining playback resolution, Vimeo Help Center (maximum video bitrate 22 Mbps at 4K, and 16 Mbps for HDR or above-4K sources; the article states the listed bitrates are a maximum; fetched 11 September 2026, article's own updated_at 25 November 2025)
- 2.Upload videos, YouTube Help (the maximum file size you can upload is 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less; fetched 11 September 2026)
- 3.uncompressed.io: the Vault, and the storage and seats each plan includes (Vault access included on every plan; Starter free with 5 GB hot; Studio, the top plan, $250 a month or $2,500 a year with 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold and five seats; extra seats $25 a month or $300 a year; blocks beyond a plan $40 per TB hot and $20 per TB cold, a month; product page, verified 11 September 2026)
- 4.uncompressed.io: security switches, documented (session watermark, forensic per-person mark, capture blocking on the native macOS path, AES-256 at rest, short-lived links, tamper-evident view log; FairPlay listed as roadmap, not shipped; product page, verified 11 September 2026)
- 5.uncompressed.io pricing (Plans have storage, seat and caption allowances; streaming has no extra charge; unlimited views, uploads and viewers on every plan including the free one; product page, verified 11 September 2026)
- 6.uncompressed.io: hot and cold storage for footage (cold storage on Max and Studio, re-hydration allowance twice the cold pool per calendar month, web dashboard archives masters up to 20 GB, larger masters move part by part through the macOS app; verified 11 September 2026)