The Alphabet Soup: ISRCs vs. ISWCs

“Metadata is just boring paperwork. I’ll figure it out later.”

ISRC codes identify your specific audio recording (your distributor handles those). ISWC codes identify your publishing composition (your publisher handles those). If those two codes are not actively linked in the global royalty databases, platforms literally do not know who to pay for the publishing side of a stream.

Matching is the whole game

The global pipeline is a matching problem at enormous scale. When you register with RightsTune, we make sure ISRCs are tied to ISWCs so usage can find the composition it belongs to. For the longer version of how ingestion, CWR delivery, and matching work, read the full lifecycle of a song registration.