International Standard Musical Work Code


International Standard Musical Work Code is a unique identifier for musical works, similar to ISBN for books. It is adopted as international standard ISO 15707. The ISO subcommittee with responsibility for the standard is TC 46/SC 9.

Format

Each code is composed of three parts:
  1. prefix element
  2. work identifier
  3. check digit
Currently, the only prefix defined is "T", indicating Musical works. However, additional prefixes may be defined in the future to expand the available range of identifiers and/or expand the system to additional types of works.

Computation of the check digit

With
034524680
061220102442640

ISWC identifiers are commonly written the form T-123.456.789-C. The grouping is for ease of reading only; the numbers do not incorporate any information about the work's region, author, publisher, etc. Rather, they are simply issued in sequence. These separators are not required, and no other separators are allowed.
The first ISWC was assigned in 1995, for the song "Dancing Queen" by ABBA; the code is T-000.000.001-0.

Usage

To register an ISWC, the following minimal information must be supplied:
Note: an ISWC identifies works, not recordings. ISRC can be used to identify recordings. Nor does it identify individual publications
Its primary purpose is in collecting society administration, and to clearly identify works in legal contracts. It would also be useful in library cataloguing.
Due to the fact that a musical work can have multiple authors, it is inevitable that, on rare occasions, a duplicate ISWC might exist and might not be detected immediately. Because of the existing business practices among collecting societies, it is not possible to simply declare an ISWC as obsolete. In such cases, as soon as they are identified, the system will deal with duplicate registrations by linking such registration records in the ISWC database and its related products.