Catalog & Rights Operations

The part of music nobody photographs

A release is not a song. It's a song plus a set of identifiers that have to agree with each other across systems that were never designed to talk.

A recording gets an ISRC. The underlying composition gets an ISWC. The writer and publisher each get an IPI. The release itself gets a UPC. Those four codes live in a distributor's database, a performing rights organization's registry, the Mechanical Licensing Collective's portal, and the U.S. Copyright Office — four systems, four schemas, four ideas of what a "title" is, and no automatic reconciliation between any of them.

When they disagree, nothing breaks loudly. The song still streams. It just pays the wrong person, or nobody, and it does that quietly for years.

What I actually do

I've administered an independent release catalog since 2018 — my own recordings and my collaborators' — across TuneCore, DistroKid and Ditto. Since 2023 I've handled the rights side for my own catalog: registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, the Mechanical Licensing Collective, and a performing rights organization.

The work is mostly the same three things, repeated:

• Assign and track identifiers so every recording and composition has one, and the same one everywhere.
• Cross-reference before trusting. A record from a distributor's dashboard gets checked against the registry before I treat it as true. They disagree more often than you'd expect.
• Keep the documentation. Every release has a written record of what was registered, where, when, and with which codes — because in three years, when a statement looks wrong, the only thing that settles it is the paperwork.

The decision that shaped everything else

Early on I had a choice: trust the distributor's metadata as the source of truth, or keep my own record and reconcile against theirs.

Trusting the distributor is faster and it's what most independent artists do. I kept my own record. It's more work every single release, and it has caught discrepancies I would otherwise never have seen — a title punctuated differently in two systems, a writer split that didn't carry, a code that got reassigned.

That habit is the reason I write the sentence I keep repeating: a record isn't reliable until it's checked against another source. Not because it's a nice principle, but because I've watched the unchecked version be wrong.

What I'd tell you in an interview

I've never done this inside a company. There was no team, no ticketing system I inherited, no senior person reviewing my work. Everything above is self-directed, and the discipline exists because there was nobody else to catch my mistakes.

I think that's an argument for me rather than against me, but I'd rather you hear it from me than work it out later.

Where to look next

The same habit, rebuilt as software, is the fact ledger — a resume writer that can only select from verified claims, and refuses to build a document containing anything else.

Systems administered in

TuneCore · DistroKid · Ditto · ASCAP · BMI · Mechanical Licensing Collective · U.S. Copyright Office