We just sent off our new album to get mastered.
This is our first time using a professional mastering house, DES Mastering in Dallas Texas. I linked to their tips page, a good read.
On their info sheet is a place for ISRC codes. I had seen that acronym before when uploading other songs to Tunecore, but successfully ignored it.
At first I thought this was a special tone encoded into a master that let Arbitron, Soundscan and all the world know who’s song they were hearing, but I guess this isn’t the case. But it kind of is???
It sounds like the usisrc.org website is saying that you can digitally attach it to your master so that it is easier to collect royalties. Yet, over at Johnvestman.com, they are saying you use it so you can get paid for digital music sales, but it’s for documentation purposes only.
SO! While I am still confused as to exactly what an ISRC code is and what it helps you accomplish, I dropped the $75 to apply for codes. This was approved, and I excitedly logged back into usisrc.org to finally figure out what all this meant and apply our new ISRC codes to our new songs.
I read all about the country code, registrant code, and how to assign the rest of the digits. I created a database and figured that I should go back and assign codes to songs we have already released. Now I was finally ready to officially assign these codes on the usisrc.org website.
BUT!!! It seems you don’t actually, officially assign anything. I was so disappointed.
Now, I assume that documenting the code you assign to each song when uploading to your digital distributer AND probably assigning the code in ASCAP or whoever you use for royalty collection is where the deed gets done. Somehow. But since I can’t find my ASCAP member code, I can log in to read what they have to say about it. Maybe I’ll find out in a week when we upload our songs to Tunecore or whoever we decided to use this time.
If anyone has some tasty info regarding ISRC codes, I would love to hear it!!
Thanks!
Tony Coke
