Niclas Molinder addresses the crowd at ASCAP’s “I Create Music” expo. (Photo: Paula Parisi/MaxTheTrax)

Niclas Molinder’s Auddly song project app was a big hit at the ASCAP “I Create Music” Expo, where creatives were eager to embrace technologies that could help protect copyright and manage royalties in the digital era. Speaking on the panel “Getting Credit Where Credit is Due,” Molinder, who hails from Sweden, was nice enough to provide a tutorial on the intricacies of metadata tagging.

“Data is kind of boring, and something creative people don’t want to touch,” he shared in preamble. “That was one of the reasons I started Auddly. As a songwriter-producer I know how it feels to be in the studio, and so focused on what comes out of the speakers. But there is tons of information connected to that sound that needs to be taken care of if it is your career and your business.”

Streaming currently accounts for about 51% of US music distribution. “Imagine when we get up to 70 or 80%? We don’t know what the industry is going to look like in the future. You may want to own your master, or own your publishing, or assign to a publisher, or use a record label. Whatever you choose, we need to make sure everyone you work with has the same view of all the information necessary to get paid,” Molinder said.  Here, in his words, is how it works:

4 Codes That Control the Industry

1. IPI Number: There are four codes that control the music industry, and the most important is the IPI number, which is your social security number as a songwriter. It stands for Interested Parties Information, and it is assigned when you become a member of a Performing Rights Organization like ASCAP. Each publisher and each songwriter has an IPI. When you’re writing a song you need to make sure that each and everyone of the songwriters in the room gets your IPI number, so they can pass it along to the publisher and it will wind up on the registration for the song. You of course need to add your name as well, but include the IPI. Auddly keeps track of your IPI for you. If you use our system all split sheets and any format that leaves our system will include your IPI.

2. ISWC Number: The International Standard Work Code is a unique code for the melody and lyric. The ISWC doesn’t have any sound  connected to it. It is based on three things: a) the number of IPIs – the actual songwriters and publishers; b) the percentage – how the IPIs share and split to 100%, not less, not more; c) the song title. This last causes more problems than you think, because in this registration world collaborators need to use exactly the same title. Because if you tell your publisher the song is called “I Love You,” and another person tells their publisher it’s called “Love You,” that results in three, four, five publishers registering the song with different titles, and a lot of confusion. The song will wind up in more than one ISWC. The ISWC is created when you or your publisher register a song with ASCAP, or other PRO. Every song has a unique ISWC. One of the big problems is multiple ISWC codes for the same song.

3. ISRC Code: The International Standard of Recording Code. Each recording — down to each separate stem, instrumental, TV track, each recording — should have a unique ISRC. Because when Spotify or Apple or Pandora is playing a song, a customer sees the name of the song, but in the background it’s playing an ISRC code. So when they report back to your publisher and to ASCAP, they get the title and the ISRC code, which carries the information about your percentage of the split. And the ISRC cross-references the ISWC. The ISRC refers down to you and the percentage you should have.

4. IPN Code: The International Performer Number. You don’t really use that here in the US. It’s connected to what we in Europe call neighboring rights, for payment when your music is played on radio and TV.

So those are the four, but what you should really focus on initially is keeping track of your IPI, and making sure you get IPI numbers from all of your collaborators in the room. That is going to make it so much easier to collect your money, just by being more careful about that one thing. What takes you seconds in a session will make things so much easier for your publisher and ASCAP to handle the relationship with the streaming services. And it’s even more important for creators that own their own masters and use aggregators, doing all this without the help of publishers and record labels.

Auddly is a free platform, where each song is assigned a unique song room. Songwriters, producers, musicians – anyone who owns a piece of the song — enters this virtual “room.” You can see who is there and have access to them; it’s transparent. So everyone agrees on the title, the splits, has access to the codes. We sign with  a “digital handshake.” This digital handshake is equal to a mutual agreement. But we’re an international platform and there are different laws in different countries. The fact is, if someone wants to cause trouble, they’re going to whether it’s signed in ink or digitally.

So Auddly is support for the creative process. We wanted to create a  tool for it, but have it interrupt creative process as little as possible. You use it for a few seconds a day to add this information and agree with your fellow music creators. The important feature is the instant quality, and the ability to document these things at the time the music is being created. Because there is only one group of people in the world that know the truth about this – and that is the people in the the studio.

No manager, no publisher, no one else can tell you how you should split the song, or who played something on it, or who produced it. Together, we creators need to take responsibility. But that is not the fun part, so that is why we created this app, to at least make it more convenient. We need to get the credit that we deserve, and build toward a positive future for music and streaming.