The Missing Number
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Somewhere a server is processing a royalty for a song of yours right now, and the only thing it knows about you is a code. Not your name, not your face, a code. If that code is missing or wrong, the payment doesn't stop, it just can't find you. This month we pulled apart the three that run the whole system: the ISRC, the ISWC and the IPI. And once you see it, you see it everywhere in the month's news, in a songwriter's fight over where his rights count, in AI that can now hear music in a film but not name its owner, in a fraudster betting that money lost in an unreadable system was nobody's to begin with. Being recognised is the whole game.
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Three questions the royalty system asks about every stream. Which recording is this? The ISRC, on your recording. Which song is this? The ISWC, on your song. Who wrote it? The IPI, on you. Get all three right and a royalty finds its way home. Miss one and the money still gets collected, it just has nowhere to land.
Your distributor hands you the first one automatically, which is why the recording side of your income mostly works by default. The other two only exist if you registered with a collecting society, and many artists never did. So the composition side of every stream accrues quietly in pools you've never heard of, under deadlines you aren't watching. Not stolen. Just unmatched to a name the system can read.
The fix is smaller than it sounds: one society membership, one IPI, and your works registered with splits that add up. Cheaper to set up before your next release than to claw back after.
Full breakdown: ISWC vs ISRC · What is an IPI number · How to find your ISWC
The Read
A single 1962 song could decide whether songwriters get their rights back worldwide
Termination rights let a songwriter reclaim a copyright they signed away decades ago. The open question was always whether that reclaim stops at the US border or reaches everywhere the song earns. If it's worldwide, it's one of the strongest levers a writer has to undo a bad early deal, and it would reach any European writer whose songs earn in the US too, which is why the majors are fighting it.
Songwriter Cyril Vetter has asked the US Supreme Court not to hear the majors' and BMG's challenge to a ruling that says termination returns a writer's rights across the whole world, not just at home. The publishers bought into the disputed song specifically to bring the case.
The cue sheet problem is being handed to AI, which raises the same old question
Last month's explainer was the cue sheet: the form that tells a society your music was in a film, and strands your royalties when it's missing. Now the industry is automating it, letting AI listen to a finished mix and build the cue sheet itself. Useful, but it only works on music the system can already recognise, and that still depends on your work being registered in the first place.
Music Reports has plugged AudioShake's audio recognition into its cue sheet platform, so a single upload can detect each piece of music in a production and draft the cue data automatically. It's a vendor case study, but the direction is real: finding the music is becoming a solved problem, while proving it's yours is not. And recognition only names music the system already has on file. Commercial tracks and library music usually are. An original score written for that production usually isn't, so the cues most likely to come back unnamed are the composer's own. The system can flag and time them, but someone still has to fill in who wrote them. The export formats named so far are for US and UK societies, and nothing here changes who is responsible for filing. Finding the music is getting easier. Naming its owner still depends on registration, and on someone sending the sheet.
A convicted streaming fraudster says your stolen royalties were too small to matter
This is the same pro-rata pool that lets AI-cloned tracks and bot farms quietly redirect real artists' money, now being used as a legal defence. The argument: because the theft is spread across millions of writers, no single one was really harmed. It's the exact mechanism that makes the black box so hard to fight, harm that's real in total but invisible per person.
Michael Smith, who pulled billions of fake plays using mass-uploaded AI songs and already owes over 8 million dollars in restitution, is asking for no prison time, calling the losses "a drop in an ocean." His sentence will be the first US precedent for AI-assisted streaming fraud.
The IPI, explained
Of the three codes, the IPI is the one almost nobody sets up. It's a permanent number that tells any society a royalty is yours, not another writer's with a similar name. You get one free when you join a society. One registration, and the system can finally find you.
From Artistic Futures
Artistic Futures is a Creative Europe-funded project building tools so independent European creators can see where royalty and metadata gaps cost them money, and what to do about it.
This month we published three guides on the identifiers behind every royalty, the ISRC, ISWC and IPI, because they turned up again and again in our survey as the part of releasing music people understand least. The tool we're building automates the checks these guides walk through by hand. Subscribers here get early access.
ISWC vs ISRC · IPI · How to find your ISWC
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Artistic Futures is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. #ArtisticFutures #CreativeEurope
