IRSC Code- What is it, Why you need it, How you can get it

 

What is an IRSC Code?

The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), is a standard that every musician, record producer or any sound recording copyright owner must follow in order to have their works tracked and get paid with royalties.

ISRC code is embedded on every song MP3 or audio CD discs. This is done by a mastering engineer during the final stage of CD audio production.

It is a 12 character code (CC-ORG-YY-NNNNN)

Where:
CC- is the country code (US, BR, NZ,etc).
ORG – uniquely identifies the registrant. This is the registrant unique code.
YY – is the registration year of a specific track to ISRC. Take note this is different from copyright registration year or year the track has been commercially released.
NNNNN – a unique number of digits identifying the sound recording. In the entire ISRC catalog worldwide, no sound recording should have the same ISRC.

Example, a recording of the song “Aruanda” by the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto would look like this: BR-VRV-67-66776

• BR for Brazil
• VRV for Verve Records (for example)
• 67 for 1967
• 00729 is the unique id identifying this particular recording

Use of IRSC Codes

The purpose of ISRC is used in tracking sound recording and uniquely identifying the songs and creators for the purpose of royalty payments.

If you are planning to earn money from your created sound recordings, one of the most important things you should do is to add your ISRC code to all of those released recordings. Of course, before you have the right to add those ISRC codes, make sure you thoroughly own the sound recording copyright of that specific work or else you are not authorized.

How to get ISRC codes

The easiest thing is to apply online here: https://usisrc.org/ , there is a single fee for the application and it will gives you right to issue ISRC codes to a maximum of 100,000 recordings. Now that is lot, and of course I can see it is more than enough for you.

Make sure that once you release a commercially based sound recordings (in the hope of obtaining a profit), it should have ISRC code in it. Radio stations, broadcasters, etc used some kind of software in extracting ISRC code automatically from the recordings they play for royalty payments.

*Note that an ISRC code identifies a particular recording, not the song itself. Therefore, different recordings, edits, and remixes of the same song will each have their own ISRC code.

The code is encoded at the mastering stage of the recording and they cannot be added afterwards. Because of this, the codes must be present on the audio CD master for CD replication.

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