CISAC
The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers — the international umbrella body for CMOs worldwide. CISAC sets standards for work registration (including CWR), administers CIS-Net, and promotes best practices in copyright management.
Articles about CISAC
How to Register Your Lyrics and Protect Your Songwriting Rights
Introduction As an indie musician, your lyrics are your heart and soul poured into words—vulnerable, raw, and uniquely yours. However, the digital landscape is more akin to a bustling metropolis than a quiet retreat, with songs flying around like carrier pigeons on caffeine.
Understanding Performing Rights Organizations: How PROs Protect and Monetize Your Music
If you write, publish, or build systems around music, understanding PRO music rights is where unpaid royalties either get caught or slip away. This article breaks down how performing rights organizations operate, covering licensing models, reporting and metadata requirements, reciprocal cross-border flows, and a numeric distribution example that traces money from licensee to writer.
Copyright Chain of Title in Music: How to Establish and Verify Ownership
Proving who actually owns a song or master is rarely straightforward; missing split sheets, conflicting society entries, and legacy transfers create real operational risk. This guide lays out a step-by-step approach to build and verify a reliable copyright chain of title for both compositions and sound recordings, listing the exact documents, registry checks, APIs, and red flags you should use.
Controversial Take: Are Music Publishing Companies Taking Too Much From Artists?
Ah, the music industry! It's a world filled with glitz, glam, and the occasional off-key note about music rights collection .
Understanding Performing Rights Organizations: How PROs Protect and Monetize Your Music
PRO music licensing is the mechanism that turns public performances into payable composition royalties, but the work of converting plays into cash depends on precise registrations, reciprocal agreements, and messy data flows. Here we map how ASCAP , BMI , PRS and other societies detect use, match metadata, and route payments across borders so you can design systems or resolve allocation errors.
Music Metadata Standards: Essential Information for Rights Management and Royalty Payments
Missing or incorrect metadata is the single biggest operational cause of unpaid royalties, and music metadata standards are the practical rules that prevent those losses by defining identifiers, fields, and delivery flows. This article unpacks the identifiers and formats you actually need to manage rights and payments — ISRC, ISWC, GRid, IPI, UPC, DDEX ERN and RIN, in-file tags and society feeds — and shows how to validate, map, and remediate metadata in real ingestion and reconciliation pipelines.
Designing a Music Rights Data Model: Identifiers, Entities, and Relationship Patterns for Developers
A robust music rights data model is the foundation for accurate publishing, licensing, and royalty workflows in any production system. This guide gives developers, data architects, and music professionals a standards-aligned, production-ready blueprint for identifiers, canonical entities, relationship patterns, and practical techniques for reconciliation, provenance, and time-bounded rights.
The Complete Guide to Song Structure and Parts
Song Structure and Parts determine how musical ideas communicate with listeners and how those sections are documented and monetized. This guide maps every common part to its musical function, typical timing, and real-song examples, then translates those elements into actionable metadata , registration steps, and publishing practices you can use to protect and collect royalties.
ISWC Numbers: The International Standard for Music Works Identification
ISWC Numbers: The International Standard for Music Works Identification Article Overview Article Type: Informational Primary Goal: Explain what ISWC music identifier is, how it is structured and assigned, how it is used across publishing and royalty systems, common operational problems, and clear implementation guidance for publishers, developers, researchers, and rights administrators. Who is the reader: Researchers, music publishers, rights administrators, collection society staff, metadata engineers, catalog managers, and developers working on music rights and royalty systems who need precise, actionable information about music work identifiers.