ISRC, ISWC, UPC, IPI — which code is which

35 · 2026-09-02 · 15 min read · Español

An ISRC identifies a recording. An ISWC identifies the song that was recorded. A UPC identifies the release the recording is sold on. An IPI identifies a person or company with an interest in the song. These are not four levels of detail about one object: they identify four different kinds of entity, which is why no two of them are interchangeable, and why three of them travel with your music while the fourth travels with you.

• An ISRC identifies one recording for the life of that recording. Twelve characters, assigned by the rights owner of the recording or an authorised representative.
• An ISWC identifies the musical work — the song itself, independent of any recording of it. The letter T, nine digits and a check digit.
• A UPC identifies a release as a product for sale. It is a GS1 GTIN, and it belongs to the product rather than to the music.
• An IPI identifies a party — a writer, a composer or a publisher — and not a piece of music. It arrives when you affiliate with a society.
• You assign the ISRC, and you buy or are given the UPC. A society issues the IPI and the ISWC, and an ISWC cannot be allocated until every creator on the work has an IPI.

What does each of the four codes identify?

An ISRC identifies a recording, an ISWC the song, a UPC the release, and an IPI a person or company involved in the song.

A work, a recording, a product and a person are four different kinds of entity, and each of these codes belongs to exactly one of them. Four codes, four categories, and one delivery form that gives three of them boxes the same width.

That is the whole confusion, and it is not the reader’s fault. Every one of these standards was written by a different organisation, for a different industry, in a different decade, to solve a problem the others were not thinking about.

Why does one song need four different codes?

Because the song, the recording, the release and the people who made them are four separate kinds of thing, each owned and paid separately.

This is not our framing. It is the ISRC standard’s own, and it is worth reading in the original, from Annex B of the Handbook:

Musical works (songs) and recordings are distinct categories of entity, and they are therefore identified by distinct categories of identifier.

The annex then draws it. One diagram, three levels: a musical work is performed in a recording, and a recording is included in a product. A song can be recorded once or fifty times and each recording takes its own ISRC; several songs can sit inside one recording, which is what a medley is. The Handbook is explicit that the recording is “independent of the product in which the recording is included” — the product is a decision someone in marketing makes afterwards.

Now count what is on that diagram. Work, recording, product. The IPI is not there, and its absence is the most useful thing about it: the diagram is about things, and the IPI is about people.

Which is why the fourth code comes from a system that does not describe music at all. CISAC, which owns the IPI system, defines its purpose as “the globally unique identification of a natural person or legal entity with an interest in an artistic work across all categories of works, different roles in relation to a work (composer, arranger, publisher, etc.) and the corresponding rights in a work.” Not a song. A party with a stake in one.

Delivery formats agree, and they are the least sentimental witnesses available. DDEX, whose message format your distributor’s delivery is written in, keeps separate lists of what may identify a sound recording, what may identify a release, and what may identify a party — and the party list is the one holding IPI and ISNI. Four kinds of thing, four lists, no overlap.

One consequence is worth pinning down before it bites, because it is the single most common misreading of all this: a new recording of an existing song takes a new ISRC and keeps the same ISWC. Which versions count as new recordings is a question with about thirty rules attached and it has its own page.

Which code answers the question you actually have?

Match the code to the kind of thing your question is about: the song, the recording, the release, or the person.

That sounds like a slogan until you use it, at which point it does most of the work. Here it is applied to the four questions this audience actually turns up with.

The value is in the second column, and it is diagnostic. If your question is about a person and you are trying to answer it with a code that identifies a recording, you are not going to get there by trying harder.

The third row is a handoff rather than an answer: what the release identifier answers that an ISRC cannot is a two-code comparison with a page of its own.

Where each answer is actually found is a separate matter and mostly belongs to other pages. Finding the ISRC of a track that is already live takes four routes and a page of its own; this one names none of them, for any of the four codes.

Which of these codes can you go and get, and which have to arrive?

You assign the ISRC and buy or are given the UPC; a society issues the IPI and the ISWC, and neither can be requested.

That split is sharper than anything in the four definitions, and nobody tells you about it. Two of these codes are things you do. Two are things done to you.

The ISRC you assign yourself. The Handbook is plain about it in clause 3.1: an ISRC “identifies a recording through its entire life and is assigned by the rights owner of the recording or an authorised representative.” A distributor assigning your codes is doing it as your authorised representative, not instead of you. Whether to hold your own prefix, what each route costs and what it obliges is a decision with three real answers, and they are all on another page.

The UPC you buy, or take. GS1 defines a GTIN as “a GS1 identification key used to identify a trade item, which can be a product you sell or service you offer” — a code for a thing on sale, issued by an organisation that mostly numbers groceries. Buying one is a three-step checkout and $30 for a single GTIN with no renewal fee. Most distributors hand you one at no charge.

The IPI arrives. SUISA, which operates the IPI system on behalf of CISAC, describes it as the international identification number of an author or publisher — and you get one automatically on joining a collective management organisation. CISAC’s own description of the base number uses the same word: it is “allocated automatically by the IPI System to each interested party.” There is no application. There is a membership, and the number is a consequence of it.

The ISWC arrives too, and the agency will tell you so directly. Asked whether a creator or publisher can apply for one, the ISWC International Agency answers in four words and a full stop: “No, ISWCs are only assigned by the authorised local or regional Registration Agency.” Registration Agencies are responsible for the assignment; you register the work, and the code comes back.

So half of this alphabet is under your control and half of it is downstream of a membership you may not have taken out yet. That is the actual reason people arrive at a split sheet with two of the four fields empty.

Why can a song not get an ISWC until every writer has an IPI?

Because a Registration Agency allocates an ISWC only once all creators have been uniquely identified, and the IPI Name Number is that identification.

The agency states both halves. First the condition: “An ISWC code is only allocated by the local Registration Agency when all of the creators of the work have been uniquely identified.” Then, on what has to be supplied for that to happen: “Complete metadata must be provided, including the Original Title and the IPI Name Numbers and Roles of all creators,” with at least one creator affiliated to the Registration Agency.

Read those together and the four codes stop being a list. One of them gates another. A song with three writers, two of whom are affiliated and one of whom has been meaning to sort it out since last spring, is a song that cannot be uniquely identified — and a work nobody can uniquely identify does not get a code, which means it does not match cleanly anywhere the code is what the matching runs on.

Which makes the order of operations obvious and almost nobody does it in that order. The IPI comes first. Not because it is more important, but because it is upstream, and upstream things that are missing do not announce themselves — they just quietly stop the next thing from happening. Working out who the creators even are is the step before that one, and it is where the real arguments live.

One field-level warning, because it is the specific error this section exists to prevent. BMI puts it on its own FAQ in two sentences: “Your BMI account # is not your IPI#. Please do not use a BMI account number as an IPI# when registering a work.” Every society issues you an account number, and it is not the code anybody else in the world can read.

Do you need all four?

Every delivery needs an ISRC on each recording and a release identifier on the release; the ISWC and the IPI belong to the publishing side.

That is the honest sequencing, and it explains a thing that panics people unnecessarily. The recording side is what a delivery consumes: the Handbook notes that many online services require an ISRC to identify a recording at all, and DDEX’s release list is where the UPC sits. Neither of them asks about the song.

So an ISWC turning up months after the recording is live is normal. It is not a defect, it is not late, and it is not evidence that anything was done wrong — the two systems are keyed to different events. The recording gets its code at delivery. The work gets its code at registration, and registration happens when the writers get round to it.

The place this becomes concrete is a document you have probably already met. A split sheet asks for an ISWC once and an IPI once per writer, which is exactly the shape of the argument above: one code for the work, one for each of the people. If those fields are blank on yours, the fix is not to leave them blank forever, and it is also not urgent this afternoon.

And if you would rather find out which of the four you are missing across a whole catalogue than reason it out one release at a time, the checklist has an identifier layer that does it in about twenty minutes.

What do none of these codes tell you?

None of these four codes is a record of ownership, and the ISRC standard says so about itself in writing.

Who owns what is the one question all four of them decline.

Clause A.14.6, and there is nothing ambiguous in it:

Assignment of an ISRC does not affect ownership in any way and the use of a particular Registrant code in an ISRC does not imply that the assigning party owns the recording, or that royalties are to be paid to them.

Every “we hold the codes, so we hold the catalogue” you have ever been handed is a sentence about a filing cabinet. Whoever handed it to you, and meant it as a claim on your masters, was talking crap.

The ISWC side draws the same line from the other direction. The agency describes the code as relating to an intangible creation “regardless of copyright status, distributions or agreements that cover this creation” — which is to say the number is deliberately blind to who owns the song and how the money is split, because a code that changed every time a deal did would be useless as an identifier. That blindness is the feature.

Two consequences follow, and both are already documented on other pages rather than here. A prefix does not identify a current rights owner, which matters enormously when a relationship ends. And identifiers do not move when ownership does — a split can be renegotiated on Tuesday and every code stays exactly as it was.

What proves ownership is the paperwork: the agreements, the registrations, the signed sheets. The codes are the labels on the outside of the box. Useful, permanent, and completely silent about what is inside.

FAQ

Is an IPI the same thing as a CAE number?

Yes. IPI stands for Interested Parties Information and CAE stands for Composer, Author and Publisher, and the IPI system replaced the older CAE one — BMI’s own FAQ files them under one heading. A form asking for a CAE number and a form asking for an IPI number want the same eleven digits. If you are holding a nine-digit number from an older registration, it is the same number with leading zeros stripped: pad it back to eleven and use it.

Can one person have more than one IPI number?

Yes, and having several is normal rather than a mistake. SUISA, which operates the IPI system, describes two kinds: an IP Name Number for each name a party is known by, and a single IP Base Number underneath that ties all of them together. BMI states the same thing from its own side — writers and publishers are assigned a unique number for each name or AKA on file. Register a work under the name you want printed on it, and use the IPI Name Number that belongs to that name.

My distributor gave me an ISRC and a UPC. Do I still need an ISWC and an IPI?

Yes, if anyone is ever going to collect publishing money for the song. An ISRC and a UPC are a recording code and a product code, and both of them live on the side of the business your distributor settles. The song is a separate copyright with its own registrations, its own societies and its own statement, and those are keyed to the ISWC and to the writers’ IPI numbers. A distributor handing you two codes has not given you the other two and was never going to.

What is a GRid, and where does it fit?

A GRid is a release identifier, sitting in the same slot as a UPC rather than competing with the other codes here. DDEX lists the identifiers a release may carry as a GRid, a UPC, an EAN, a catalogue number or a proprietary id, which puts the GRid alongside the UPC in the product category and not in a fifth one. In practice your distributor generates it if the delivery format wants it, and no form is going to ask you for one.

Sources

• IFPI, International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) Handbook, 4th edition, 2021 — Annex B and B.1, on PDF page 25: that the entity an ISRC identifies is a recording, independent of the product it is included in; that musical works and recordings are distinct categories of entity identified by distinct categories of identifier; and the figure relating work, recording and product.
• IFPI, ISRC Handbook, clause 3.1 — that an ISRC identifies a recording through its entire life and is assigned by the rights owner or an authorised representative. Clause 3.3.1, on PDF page 7, is where the code’s twelve characters and three elements are specified.
• IFPI, ISRC Handbook, clause A.14.6 — that assignment of an ISRC does not affect ownership in any way, and that a registrant code does not imply the assigning party owns the recording or is owed the royalties.
• ISWC International Agency, The ISWC — that the ISWC is a unique, permanent and internationally recognised reference number identifying musical works; that it is the letter T, nine digits and a check digit; and that it relates to an intangible creation regardless of copyright status, distributions or agreements.
• ISWC International Agency, How to get an ISWC — that Registration Agencies are responsible for assignment, that creators and publishers cannot apply directly, and that a code is only allocated once all creators of the work have been uniquely identified.
• ISWC International Agency, ISWC for Creators and Publishers — that complete metadata including the Original Title and the IPI Name Numbers and Roles of all creators must be provided, with at least one creator affiliated to the Registration Agency.
• CISAC, IPI — the purpose of the Interested Party Information system as the globally unique identification of a natural person or legal entity with an interest in an artistic work; that SUISA administers it under CISAC and BIEM standards; and that the base number is allocated automatically to each interested party.
• SUISA, What is the IPI number? — that the IPI number is the international identification number of an author or publisher, eleven digits, that SUISA operates the system on behalf of CISAC, that a number arrives on joining a collective management organisation, and that name numbers and base numbers are different things.
• BMI, What is an IPI/CAE number? — that IPI and CAE name the same identifier, that it is publicly accessible and identifies participants on a work, that a unique number is assigned for each name or AKA on file, and that a BMI account number is not an IPI number. ASCAP’s equivalent pages refuse automated reads, so nothing here is cited to them.
• GS1 US, What is a GTIN? — the definition of a GTIN as an identification key for a trade item, being a product you sell or a service you offer.
• GS1 US, How to get a UPC barcode — the three-step purchase and the $30 single GTIN with no annual renewal fee. Read 2026-08-21; fee schedules change.
• DDEX, Identifiers for resources and releases and parties — that a release may be identified by a GRid, a UPC, an EAN, a catalogue number or a proprietary id, and that a party is identified by a DPID, an IPI, an IPN, an ISNI or a proprietary id.

Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece, and the Handbook was read from the standard’s own PDF rather than from a summary of it. Society procedures, developer interfaces and fee schedules change without notice — confirm anything operational, and any price, against the issuing body’s own pages before you act on it. None of this is legal advice.

Keeping the register

Everything above is really one filing problem: four kinds of thing, and a record for each. CatalogTracker models people as Parties in their own right — legal name, person or organization, ISNI, IPI, PRO and roles — alongside releases carrying UPC and GRid and tracks carrying ISRC and ISWC. Search takes any of the six identifiers and tells you which one matched, which is the question this page is about, asked from the other end. In development for iPhone.