Most people building a faceless AI music artist skip straight to generating tracks and posting them. That's not why they fail.

They fail because they never register the release properly — no PRO registration, no publishing administrator, sometimes not even a claimed YouTube Content ID. You can have 500,000 streams and still see close to $0 if the royalty chain isn't set up before you hit publish.

The order that actually works:

1. Lock a genre + identity you can sustain for 6+ months (not a random one-off track)

2. Build a real prompt system so output is consistent, not a slot machine

3. Register with DistroKid → PRO → publishing admin before your first real push

4. Layer three income sources instead of maxing one: streaming royalties (slow, compounding), YouTube AdSense (traffic-driven), fan memberships (loyalty-driven)

5. Only then scale to a second artist

The registration step is the one everyone skips and the one that costs the most money long-term. If you've released music without registering with a PRO yet, it's worth going back and doing it now — you can usually still register existing catalog.

Happy to answer specific questions on any step below.