International Standard Recording Code

So somewhere in the, you know, my publisher sending the information to the MLC, somewhere along the line, something got dropped.

The ISRCs weren't connected, whatever.

There's a lot of these codes that are all in there.

Anyway.

It's, you take care of the music, we'll take care of the noise.

All that stuff about data and databases and delivery platforms and codecs and ISRCs and who owns what.

Your members who are so talented at making the music that they make, they shouldn't have to worry themselves with all of this.

They should focus on their craft so that they can bring more joy and more creativity to the world.

And so we have a thing called credits.fm, which works on this a little bit.

And it basically has all of the open ISRC codes, ISWC codes, and then also IPI, ISNI, and UPC.

And my view is basically those five codes kind of make up the public domain of music metadata outside of the credits fields and things like that.

Amazing.

So, I mean, it's very much an active work in progress, but it's been exciting to see the more adoption we get across the industry, the faster it goes.

And at this point, the adoption is much wider than I ever would have expected this fast because I think it's solving problems in new ways through APIs that I guess I would say a lot of the predecessors couldn't do because of deal restrictions.

And, you know, I think a key insight for us is this idea of an ISRC is kind of a public code at this point.

That's not really like unique IP anymore, nor is an ISWC because of the MLC.

That's the PRS splits and the master split as well.

And the PPL, which is the performance, that has to be uploaded to the distribution service, but you have to have the ISRC code, which is like a separate thing that you need to...

you

have to have like your verticals of spotify but then like you're running ads on meta as well like it's just like so many moving parts and i'm just like but it made me realize how badly i want it because i was i was in that bitch i was glued to the laptop like yeah we've got to do it we've got to figure it out Does anyone have a spreadsheet? No, listen, I made the spreadsheet.

You've said recently in some really great articles I've read that the single biggest unsolved problem in music data is having authoritative links between the musical work and the sound recordings available to everyone.

But for someone with no prior knowledge, can you explain the difference between an ISRC code and the ISWC code? And why are these two identifiers so important?

OK, so the ISRC code is the unique global number assigned to each sound recording.

And the ISWC is the unique code assigned to each musical work.

So when an artist goes into the studio, they sing the musical work, assuming they're singing.

What do they find?

They find missing ISRC's.

They find audio files sitting on hard drives literally named, uh, final master real final three dot wav [chuckles] with zero metadata attached.

We've all been guilty of that naming convention.

That's a nightmare for a lender.

It is.

When critical identifiers like an ISRC are missing, and that's basically the digital fingerprint for your audio file, the royalties often end up trapped in a black box, completely untraceable.

And the financial institution simply cannot advance money against income it can't legally verify.

And to navigate it, we need to clearly separate the recording from the composition.

In the music industry architecture, an ISRC, an International Standard Recording Code, identifies a specific master sound recording.

That's the physical file you stream on your phone.

Right.

But an ISWC, an International Standard Musical Work Code, identifies the underlying intellectual property, the lyrics and the melody.

Okay, so I could have 50 different cover bands record 50 different versions of Hallelujah, generating 50 different ISRCs, but all of them must point back to the exact same ISWC so Leonard Cohen's estate gets paid.

Precisely.

Now, imagine the Audu AI perfectly recognizes a local band's original song.