September 08, 2009

Summer in Britain means music festivals and although the weather is always terrible, this middle-aged geek dragged himself to Glastonbury for the biggest festival of them all. I found myself watching The Ting Tings playing "That's Not My Name". For someone who generally thinks that music ended with Pink Floyd and Genesis, that was a pretty hip set to catch.

Anyway the song got me thinking about my day job -- something a weekend away is supposed to help you forget. I spend a lot of time working on systems to give names to recordings. Obviously you say, the name of that song is "That's Not My Name". True enough but the live version would also be called "That's Not My Name" and you'd better be sure you are talking about the right one.

So maybe the text that appears as the title of a track isn't the best name to use if you're trying to avoid confusion, though it's a good way to search for a track and a good way to promote it. What we do instead is to have each different track have a unique short string of letters and numbers as its "name". We call this the International Standard Recording Code or ISRC. It has been around since 1986 but has only become really important in the digital age. Almost every commercial track produced these days has an ISRC assigned and the ISRC is used to manage content, report usage and track royalties.

RIAA is the national organization that supports ISRC and does this for both its own members and US labels that are not associated with it -- without fear or favor. I run that operation -- as well as its international counterpart. After many years of reliance on the fax machine and US Postal Service, we now have a website (www.usisrc.org) where labels can get their "registrant code" – a prefix which allows them to assign their own ISRCs. My colleagues in Washington DC and London do a fantastic job answering queries and keeping everything running smoothly. We recently started charging for a registrant code, and the good news is that were able to keep the charge for each label down to $75 (for life).  We think it remains a great bargain because ISRC makes it so easy to manage your recordings and it’s so much cheaper than the identifiers in many other sectors.

Smaller labels that don't want to worry about ISRC can have this done for them by their distributors who have special permission from us. These distributors (we call them ISRC Managers) take a lot of strain off small labels so they can get on with what they are good at – making music.

We have been working closely with the people responsible for other identifiers – musical compositions for instance. Here the studio and the live versions of "That's Not My Name" would be associated with the same identifier of course. And there are new identifiers being developed for people as well. We hope that they will help to protect artists and writers from identity theft, while leaving them able to say "That Is My Name".

Paul Jessop
Chief Technology Adviser, RIAA
Executive Director, International ISRC Agency