This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Labels & Publishers
CISAC reveals partnership to upgrade ISWC system
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 5 February 2019
CISAC, the global grouping of song right collecting societies, has announced a partnership with Irish tech firm Spanish Point Technologies which, it says, will “speed up the process by which authors’ societies assign an ISWC code for use by digital service providers and publishers”. The alliance with Spanish Point, CISAC adds, will result in an “upgrade [of] the global information system of the ISWC”.
ISWC – or the ‘International Standard Musical Works Code’ – is the unique code attached to each and every song registered with a collecting society around the world. Since being adopted in 2002, it has become a key way of identifying musical works, song titles obviously being unreliable given that its common to have multiple songs with the same name.
The ISWC has become all the more important in the streaming age where billions of tiny micro-payments have become the norm, and music companies and organisations have had to become ever more efficient in identifying works, matching streams to rights owners, and processing the money as it flows through the system.
Confirming the new project, CISAC boss Gadi Oron said: “Investing in improved ISWC systems will immensely help music creators and publishers, authors societies and digital services navigate their way better in the rapidly growing digital music market”.
“The ISWC is the leading music industry identifier”, he went on, “and it plays an important role in facilitating the identification of musical works. [This] project … aims to increase the speed, accuracy and efficiency of the system in a way that is complementary with our members’ systems, and which keeps pace with the explosive growth of music streaming”.
Speaking for Spanish Point, the firm’s CEO Donal Cullen added: “Using modern cloud technologies and our innovative matching engine, the improved ISWC systems will assist societies in exchanging information with each other and music users, such as digital service providers and publishers. This will encourage greater use of the ISWC and should lead to more creators’ works being accurately identified and paid for”.
And wouldn’t that be a nice thing?
