What is an ISRC? Music Industry - 5 Mins or Less

Welcome to our “Music Industry - 5 Mins or Less” video series.  These short bites are designed to help everyone understand the basics of the music industry and how it all fits together.

You hear about it all the time, but what is an ISRC?  If you are a music creator/owner/administrator - it is HOW YOU GET PAID!  

Click on these links for more information about this topic:

https://exploration.io/what-is-a-composition/#importantmetadata

https://www.themlc.com/preparing-2021

In This Video: ISRC stands for International Standard Recording Code and it’s a 12-digit code that is assigned to each unique sound recording.   

Any sound recordings that are made commercially available will need an ISRC. Without the ISRC, it would be impossible to keep track of when recordings are used and when one should be getting paid.  

Songwriters and publishers should do their best to collect every ISRC code for every recording made of a song in their catalog.  The MLC, Harry Fox, Music Reports, the PROS, and YouTube all use the ISRC code to connect the uses of music on their platforms back to the correct publishers and songwriters to pay royalties.

Updating metadata at all platforms ensures that songwriters don’t miss getting paid for a release.

any of the key players (artist, record label, and music distributor) can assign the ISRC to the works in question—it all depends on the particular situation of the artist.

It’s most typical to see a music distributor assign the ISRCs on behalf of the artist’s record label, although as stated above, an independent artist can take care of the ISRCs themselves, no record label or music distributor needed. This can be done most easily through services like CD Baby, TuneCore, and DistroKid or even Exploration.