Are you in that happy category of folks that don’t know what an “ISRC” is?  Or do you know what it is and it’s driving you crazy?  If you’re in the latter group, there is good news for you.  SoundExchange and the IFPI have partnered to bring you a searchable database of ISRCs, and here’s why you care.

Starting in the early 1990s, the music industry created a unique track-level identifier called the International Standard Recording Code or “ISRC”.  It took a little while for the code to propagate but by the time digital distribution started to get serious around 2000, ISRCs were in wide use mostly embedded in the PQ data of compact discs, although a master list of some kind usually lived in the files of record companies.

The ISRC is the one common identifier that allows the recording to be tracked and associated with other…