The Music Producers Guild’s Mastering Group and European Broadcasting Union (EBU) are claiming ‘a significant breakthrough for all recording artists and other copyright owners’ with an industry standard for embedding an ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) within digital music files.
This is expected make accurate file identification and content tracking easier and could help royalty agencies develop more precise systems for payments. ‘Every song released – and indeed every version of that song - is allocated a unique ISRC by the record label,’ says MPG Mastering Group board member and Alchemy Mastering Engineer Barry Grint, who led the initiative. ‘In the past, the ISRC information was included within sub data streams of a CD, so a track could be identified by its associated ISRC.
‘However, now that we have entered the digital age and are increasingly using digital WAV files, the ability to securely associate ISRC data with specific tracks has been lost because the only common way to incorporate ISRC into a WAV file is via the file name. If someone renames the file – or if the name is truncated or amended by a software program – the vital ISRC information can easily be lost. Many record companies are not aware of this, and assume that ISRCs are being embedded into WAV files. Technically that just isn’t possible, so many mastering engineers were simply adding the code to the file title, which was an insecure practise.’
EBU has developed the Broadcast WAV File (BWF), a variant of the WAV file for use by broadcasters. But while this allows metadata to be added within a file, no standard had been defined as to how and where the data should be stored. Additionally workstation manufacturers offering the ability to create BWF files lacked a consensus over the fields in which data should be entered.
As a resault, Grint approached the EBU and asked them to adapt the BWF standard so that ISRCs could once again be included in metadata in a regular way: ‘The new system is simple to implement and the MPG is encouraging workstation manufacturers and record companies to use BWF in preference to WAV as the standard specification for file exchange,’ he says. ‘Once adopted, this will allow ISRCs to flow through the whole production chain. iTunes and other aggregators will be able to pull the ISRC through during encoding and broadcast playout systems can easily be adapted to recognise the ISRC, making airplay reporting far more accurate.
‘This is a major step forward for the music industry as it gives us the opportunity to identify with certainty every digital master file regardless of how that file is named. We would like to thank the team at the EBU for recognising the importance of this to the MPG and the Music Industry worldwide and the speed with which they were able to bring this about. By making ISRC the cornerstone of asset management and royalty reporting, we should be able to ensure a more accurate system of royalty payments and writer/performer credits, thereby supporting the income of all recording artists and copyright owners well into the future.’
More: www.mpg.org.uk
