Deezer Did Not Refuse Your Claim, It Matched Your Songs to Someone Else

If your music has landed on the wrong Deezer artist page, the claim button will keep failing, and the reason has nothing to do with your paperwork. Deezer already treats that page as somebody else’s property. A claim on it reads to the system as a request to take over another artist’s profile, so it goes nowhere. What actually fixes this is a separation request, which lifts your releases off that page and puts them on one that belongs to you. Three routes exist for filing it, and the right one depends on whether you have any live release crediting you as main artist. There is also one obvious move that quietly destroys your streaming history, and I will come to that.

Deezer matched a name and got the person wrong

When your distributor delivers a release, it sends Deezer a package of metadata. Inside that package sits a field for a Deezer artist identifier, a number pointing at one specific profile in the catalogue. Fill that field in correctly and your track lands exactly where it should. Every time.

Plenty of deliveries go out with that field empty. Deezer then falls back on the artist name as plain text and looks for a match. If a profile with that exact name already exists, your release joins it, and some stranger in another country wakes up with your song on their page. If nothing matches, Deezer creates a fresh profile on the spot. That auto-created profile has no photo and nobody managing it, which is why so many debut singles look like they belong to nobody at all.

The same mechanism produces the opposite headache. A stray capital letter or an accent in your artist field can make the text matcher decide you are two different people, and your catalogue ends up torn across two pages. Producer tags do it too, so a delivery credited to something like “prod by” plus your name will not match the page you already have. Check which shape you are in before you write to anyone, because the wording of the request changes.

Collect every link before you file, because support will ask for all of them

Deezer’s catalogue team works from permalinks. Send a description in prose and you get a slow reply asking for the links you could have included on day one. Gather these first.

Your Deezer artist ID	The number at the end of your artist page URL. In deezer.com/artist/705 the ID is 705. Get it from the web player address bar.
The wrong page’s artist ID	Same method, on the page your songs are currently sitting on.
Track and album permalinks	The full URL of every release of yours that is on the wrong page.
The UPC of each release	From your distributor dashboard. Deezer uses it to confirm you are credited as main artist.
ISRCs for the tracks	Also in your distributor dashboard. Needed when only some tracks moved.
A professional email address	Use the one attached to your artist work rather than a throwaway.

Route one is a separation request through Deezer for Creators

Deezer for Creators sits at creators.deezer.com and it is the tool built for this exact problem. Getting access requires a professional email address, a Deezer artist ID, and a UPC from a release that is already live and credits you as main artist. Approval usually arrives inside one to three business days. Once you are through, there is a request form for artist separation, and that is the one to use.

Now the catch that sends people round in circles for weeks. The access check wants an artist ID and a UPC that agree with each other. If everything you have released is stacked on somebody else’s page, the only ID you can supply belongs to them, and the pairing looks wrong. Artists in that position often cannot get through the door at all. If that describes you, go to route two and say plainly in the ticket that you were blocked at the access stage. That one sentence saves a round trip.

Route two is a support ticket about the music catalogue

Deezer’s normal support channel has a category for problems with music content on the platform, and this is where a catalogue correction belongs. Open a ticket and state that your releases have been attached to another artist’s profile. Paste the links you gathered underneath, and say which tracks should move and where they should go.

A lighter version is built into the app. On an album page the report button sits at the top right on both web and mobile, and one of the options is that the album was not recorded by this artist. It reaches the same team, and it works well when a single album has strayed.

Be realistic about timing. Some artists report the fix landing within days. Others have posted in Deezer’s own community forums after months of silence, and a recurring complaint there is that the in-app report alone sometimes produces nothing. If two weeks pass with no movement, post the same links in the catalogue section of that forum, where staff and volunteers work through misplaced releases in public. Stalled cases have a habit of moving once other people can see them.

Route three is a corrected redelivery from your distributor

The two routes above move your songs. This one stops the problem happening again, which matters if you release regularly. Every serious distributor has a form for incorrect artist mapping, and CD Baby, Symphonic and iMusician all publish theirs. You give them your correct Deezer artist ID and they attach it to future deliveries, and often to past ones as well.

It is the slowest and least satisfying route, because nothing visibly changes for weeks. It is also the only one that touches the cause, so file it alongside route one or two rather than instead of them.

Taking the song down is the move that costs you

The instinct at this point is obvious. Pull the release, change the artist name slightly, upload it again under something unmistakable, and let the stranger keep their page. It feels like a clean break and it takes an afternoon. You were expecting me to tell you to go ahead, weren’t you.

Do not do it. A takedown wipes your play counts on that release and they do not come back. Every link anyone has ever shared goes dead. Any playlist that picked the track up drops it, and those adds are not restored on redelivery. Worse, if your distributor still sends no artist ID, the fresh upload matches on name text all over again and can land in exactly the same place. Full price, nothing fixed.

Your royalties are safe while this is broken

This is the part nobody tells frightened artists, so here it is plainly. Payment follows the ISRC and UPC on the recording and flows through your distributor’s reporting. It does not follow the artist page. Streams counted against your track while it sat on a stranger’s profile are still your streams, and they still pay you.

What you are losing is different and slower. Every listener who finds the song and taps the artist name lands on somebody else’s profile and follows them. Deezer’s recommendation signals build up over there as well, and the editorial team browsing that page sees a catalogue that makes no sense. That is real damage to your growth and it compounds every week you leave it, which is why this deserves a ticket rather than a shrug. Your money, though, is not sitting in a stranger’s account.

Fixing Deezer does nothing for Spotify or Apple Music

Each streaming service keeps its own artist database and runs its own matching, so a separation on Deezer has no effect anywhere else. If the identifier was missing from your delivery, the odds are high that several services got it wrong at once. Check each one.

Spotify handles it through Spotify for Artists and Apple through Apple Music for Artists, and both run their own dispute forms with their own evidence requirements. Do them in the same week while everything is open in front of you. Chasing them one at a time months apart is how artists lose a year.

What to do this week

1. Open both artist pages in the web player and copy the IDs from the address bar.
2. List every track and album of yours that is on the wrong page, with full links.
3. Pull the UPCs and ISRCs from your distributor dashboard.
4. Apply for Deezer for Creators access. If it is refused, keep the refusal.
5. File the separation request if you got in, or a catalogue support ticket if you did not.
6. Send your distributor the correct artist ID and ask for a mapping correction.
7. Repeat the check on Spotify and Apple Music while everything is open.

One last thing worth knowing. The artist whose page you landed on usually has no idea any of this is happening, and a short friendly message to them can move things faster than a ticket. They want their catalogue clean too. It costs nothing to ask.