Metadata

By Paul Sweeting

SoundExchange, the digital performance royalty collection agency, along with the international record industry association IFPI, this week unveiled its long-awaited portal that allows users to look up the IRSC number for nearly 20 million unique music recordings, along with associated metadata.

While still something of a work in progress, the IRSC database and search tool together represent an important milestone in the music industry’s often fitful effort to bring its scattered record-keeping up to date with the myriad ways music is used and consumed today.

The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) system was established as an ISO standard for assigning unique identifiers to individual sound recordings in 1989 and is overseen by IFPI, the international federation of national recording industry trade associations. Compliance with the system was for many years spotty, as record companies continued to rely on their own in-house systems for identifying and cataloging recordings.

Since 2006, however, the use of ISRCs has grown more consistent and widespread, thanks in large measure to Apple’s insistence that labels provide ISRC numbers for every track sold through the iTunes Music Store. More recently, streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora have embraced ISRC to track song-plays for royalty purposes.

Until now, however, there has not been anything like a comprehensive, centralized database of ISRC numbers linking them with useful and usable metadata about the recordings. The database can be searched by artist name, track title, release (i.e. album) title, release data and other parameters. Once located, the metadata associated with the IRSC number can be downloaded and incorporated into playback and other applications.

“The SoundExchange ISRC Search Site is a tremendous development,” American Association of Independent Music CEO Richard Burgess said in a statment. “[It’s] something we have needed for more than a decade, and will quickly become an invaluable resource for everyone in the music industry. For A2IM, this means greater transparency and will improve the accuracy of payments to our artists and labels.”

The SoundExchange IRSC portal bookends a similar one for International Standard Music Works Codes (ISWC) lookup maintained by CISAC, the international federation of publisher and songwriter societies.

According to Recording Industry Association of America CTO David Hughes, the long-term goal is to link the two databases so that developers can begin building applications to streamline the notoriously Byzantine process of licensing music.

“ISRC data is a foundation on which all these other [copyright management information] tools can be built,” Hughes explained at the Copyright & Technology conference in January. “The first thing we have to do is make sure we’re dealing with the exact same recording of the exact same underlying song and assign a number to that. We’re working now on disambiguating that. The next step will be to link that database to an ISWC database. Then on top of that the industry or private parties can start building the sort of look up rights database we need.”