[advocacy] ISRC and Ogg Vorbis

[Moritz Grimm]

Daniel James wrote:
> From: Philippa Morrell <philippa.morrell at ifpi.org>
> To: "'Daniel James'" <daniel at mondodesigno.com>
>  able to help you. Certainly in general an ISRC when presented
>  visually is structured like this: ISRC GB-XX1-02-00001; however when
>  it is encoded into an appropriate digital format it would look like
>  this: GBXX10200001

The ISRC is supposed to identify a recording, and be pretty much human
readable. While the version without dashes is the one that is stored in
CD-A subchannels, for example, I prefer to use the more readable one in
the tags of our releases. (The way it should be, imo)

As you might have figured out already, it's puzzled together from
<country><registrant><year><number>. "country" is clear, I guess.
"registrant" is what you get from IFPI. "year" is the year when you gave
a recording an ISRC - e.g. it's 2002 that you become a registrant, then
you're supposed to be assigning ...-02-... ISRCs to your back catalogue,
too. This is important, as the registrant code (here: XX1) gets reused
when you decide to unregister with IFPI. The registrant-year combination
is unique, though. The last "number" is something you can freely issue
to your recordings - all you have to care about is that you assign no
number twice. Therefore, using simple counting (starting at 00001) is
encouraged to keep it simple and free from conflicts.

When I introduced this tag last year, people criticised the
two-digit-year issue. Eventually (somewhen in the 2070s, IIRC), they
will run out of ISRCs. This might be not an actual problem at the
moment, but it's an issue concerning confidence into the ISRC. When I
registered with IFPI, those employees all were pretty enthusiastic that
the ISRC will be part of a label code replacement "really soon now".
This would be great as it is very easy to get registered with IFPI
compared to getting a label code - selling own music wouldn't fail at
the budget so often any more and be less "big-business". But as long as
you're not directly talking to those employees, you rarely get to hear
about the ISRC. Those are two questions that might be worth getting an
answer for ...

To become an ISRC registrant, all you need to have is a 1-man-company.
Registering such a thing with local authorities is EUR20 in Germany, for
example. Pay that fee and you've got a company. All you need to do is
care about tax declarations etc ... :) Having the company is more
important that making any revenue or profit from it.

I like the ISRC, and I think it's worth being supported. It's one of the
few things the bigger labels can't keep for themselves alone as it is so
easy to become a registrant.

I use something equivalent to -c "ISRC=GB-XX1-02-00001". Taking the =
out of the tags gives it the official, human-readable form.

The second version might be a good idea when considering a standard for
the should-be-understood-by-computers metadata.

Moritz


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