Hey Austin musicians! Want $200.00?!? Cool, here's an opportunity for anyone that meets these criteria:

Copyright can be used as a noun, verb or adjective and describes the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something. Previously in this blog, Carlos Alvarez from Azteca Records wrote a four-part series on music publishing.

The International Standard Musical Work Code, or ISWC, is a unique identifier for musical works. Like the ISRC is for recordings and the ISNI is for people, the ISWC helps identify and disambiguate musical works. Along with being a unique identifier, the ISWC is also permanent and an internationally recognized ISO reference number for the identification of musical works.

As formats change and the media they're recorded on ages, it becomes increasingly difficult to transfer the information off of those formats into new, more modern formats. That's basically what archival and restoration is: transferring recordings from one format to another. Usually, the transfer is from an older format on more fragile media to something newer and easier to work with.

YouTube announced this week they are implementing the ISNI standard for name disambiguation across their whole platform. The International Standard Name Identifier is an ISO-certified global standard number for uniquely identifying anyone who creates anything. Public names of a researcher, investor, writer, artist, actor, performer, publisher, etc... are unambiguously attributed by number globally in perpetuity regardless of field, medium, or type of art/creation.

I've launched my first public test for DropTracks! Everyone can go to the first beta test at test1.DropTracks.net and try it out from the fan's point of view.

International Standard Name Identifier is new metadata to resolve name ambiguity for contributors to creative works. This number can define a person, like a writer, artist, performer, producer, etc., or it can define an organization, like publishers, studios, aggregators, etc..

The newest metadata standard for music is here apparently and it is RIN-M. Soundways has a free plugin that gets saved in your DAW when you are creating the tracks and you can add everyone's information and send it along. It is a cool idea on solving the issue with how recording credits are stored and transferred. You can download the plugin here. 

Independant artists have difficulty getting into the Mastered For iTunes program, but if you wanted to try to deal directly with apple to get in here are the requirements directly from Apple. Even if you meet the requirements they may still referr you. On top of that, they also have payment thresholds and you may never get paid if you don't meet the threshold for your first payment. And now the requirements.

Technical Requirements:

This is a common issue that many of my clients don't think about until they're in the mastering studio getting asked about it. Did you mean to not capitalize this word? Well, here are some guidelines.