ISRCs and Why You Need Them

In the early 1990s, the industry evolved standard naming systems to identify individual sound recordings and songs.  Each sound recording gets an International Sound Recording Code (or "ISRC") and each song gets an International Standard Musical Works Code (or "ISWC").

This post is going to focus on the ISRC.  You need to assign an ISRC to each recording you release--and release should be broadly defined.  You will need one to manufacture any physical record and you ought to have one before releasing any digital record.  You should have one before you register sound recordings with SoundExchange, for example.  If this post seems complex, it's actually not.  Handling ISRCs is pretty simple and repetitive once you get some basic materials tied down.

Getting an ISRC is sort of like getting a phone number or a tax ID number. In the US, you get a registrant code from US ISRC at this link.  You need to get the numbers from an authorized source and then you use them repeatedly without changing them.  You wouldn't think of getting a tax ID number from your digital distributor, so don't think you should get an ISRC from them either.  You give your distributor the ISRC for each track, not the other way around.

ISRCs are assigned once and stay the same for the life of the recording regardless of format.  You assign a new ISRC for edits of different length (like a single edit or film edit), remixes and surround sound or 3D mixes.  You can assign an ISRC retroactively, such as when a recording is re-released, but you have to hope that no one in the distribution chain has taken it upon themselves to assign their own ISRC without telling you.  Cleaning up that mess is a real pain, so much better to assign an ISRC before release.

ISRCs are embedded in physical discs.  You encode ISRCs and other PQ-data in the Pre-Master so that the ISRC for each track is encoded in the disc subcode (Q channel) during mastering.  Your duplicator will know how to handle this, but you have to give them the individual track ISRCs and potentially other data.  

For digital formats you can include ISRCs using authoring software and the ISRC can be embedded in an ID3 tag--but again, you need to have the ISRC in order to encode it.  That goes without saying, but since I see this mistake frequently, I'm going to say it anyway. Once the ISRC is embedded in the ID3 tag, it becomes a part of the file and is transmitted whenever the audio is streamed or downloaded.

If you have an ISRC question, the best resource is the ISRC Handbook from the IFPI.

For reasons that no one really understands, there have been people over the years who tried to convince artists that they didn't need an ISRC and that ISRCs were somehow a plot--which is false.  If you've been told that kind of thing, forget it, it's wrong, and given the easily anticipated complexity of per-stream accounting, it's even slightly touched as in "touched in the head."  Given the sad state of metadata in our business, the idea that someone would create this kind of phobia about the one thing that the industry did right in anticipation of the digital reality is very, very, very frustrating.

So let's accept as a given that you need an ISRC and you also need an ISWC.  You get them in different ways.  We'll focus in this post on ISRCs only, and will come back to ISWCs later.

ISRC:  An ISRC number is a 12 digit alphanumeric code that tells the user that it applies to the sound recording, the country where the copyright owner is based,  the copyright owner or "registrant", the year of release and the number assigned by the copyright owner to that particular sound recording, sometimes called the "Designation Code".  It looks like this:

Let's get one thing clear up front--you can get an ISRC regardless of whether you have a digital distribution deal.  If you sign up with a digital distributor, you are licensing the rights to reproduce and distribute your recordings to that digital distributor.  You are not transferring any ownership rights.  That day will come, but it has not come yet.

This is important for a host of reasons, but for our purposes it applies directly to ISRCs (and it will apply to ISWCs).  If you are not careful, you will find that you have signed an agreement with a digital distributor that allows them to register themselves with SoundExchange as the Sound Recording Copyright Owner (SRCO) and collect royalties for which they are not entitled in my view.  We'll address this below and give you a couple ideas about what to do about it--but as you will see, you are entitled to a "registrant code" that tells the world you own that recording.  The distributor will also have a "registrant code" and if they collect your money, they will use their registrant code and not yours, which is like telling the world that your distributor owns your recordings which they do not.

It is this kind of thing that may never get fixed or that you will be spending beaucoup time trying to fix for years to come if you let it get started incorrectly.

For now, let us all agree that only you should obtain your ISRC and anyone who uses your tracks should also be using that ISRC.

Parts of the ISRC

Note that once you have a registrant code issued the first three components (Code Identifier, Country Code and Registrant Code) will not change.