By Paul Boyette
SoundExchange has recently updated its Repertoire Matching Service, a tool within Licensee Direct that enables licensees to obtain International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) for their tracks in bulk. This service helps licensees improve the quality of their data, which then enhances our ability to pay music creators accurately.
Generally, a statutory licensee must provide the following information to SoundExchange on a monthly basis in order to identify which tracks have been used:
- Title of the recording
- Name of the featured artist
- International Standard Recording Code (“ISRC”), or the combination of both:
1. the album name (if the recording is from an album), and
2. the marketing label
An ISRC is a unique identifier for recordings, and the preferred metadata to receive instead of the reliance on album name and marketing label. By using the unique ISRC assigned to a given sound recording, SoundExchange can disambiguate sound recordings that may otherwise have similar titles or other attributes. Implementing ISRCs across our royalty services is one way we are able to pay music creators accurately and efficiently.
Previously, a licensee’s catalog submission would be returned without recordings that we were unable to match to an ISRC in our database. There are several reasons for why a match may not be made. Usually, it is because the metadata provided for a given recording is either incomplete or contains inaccuracies, which prevents our automated system from identifying the correct ISRC.
With our updated process, a licensee’s catalog submission will be returned in its entirety without omissions. This means that the recordings we weren’t able to match to an ISRC will now be included in the returned file, without matched ISRCs. Providing these recordings without matched ISRCs allows our licensees to easily resubmit them to our Repertoire Matching Service with additional and/or corrected metadata, or identify the correct ISRC manually by using our ISRC Search website.
If you have any questions, please contact our Repertoire Matching department by email at [email protected] or by phone at (202) 559-0555.
The above information is for licensees that have a Licensee Direct account. If you do not have an account, please click here to begin the registration process.