Riaa Plans Digital Id Song System

The Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) intensified its efforts to jump-start the commercial online music business with the Oct. 12 announcement that it has launched a project to develop "a standardized system for identifying digital files of sound recordings."
Such a "bar code" system, which is envisioned as supporting sales, licensing, and tracking of online music, is seen as one of the necessary drivers of a legitimate music marketplace.
The U.S. trade group says it will work with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industry Assn. of Japan on the project, which it says is intended to be available for worldwide use.
The project will also seek the cooperation and support of "other music-industry interests," according to the RIAA, such as distributors and on- and offline retailers.
The RIAA has tapped U.K. consultancy Rightscom.com to manage the project. Mark Isherwood, lead consultant for the company, is the former director of new technology for U.K. authors' rights body the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society.
No timetable for development or rollout of the proposed ID system was given. Executives at the RIAA had not returned calls by press time; Isherwood and IFPI executives could not be reached.
The move is the latest in a series of online-commerce initiatives undertaken recently by the RIAA. On Oct. 10, it unveiled an agreement with the Harry Fox Agency, the mechanical-royalty collection unit of the National Music Publishers' Assn., to create new procedures to expedite licensing of recorded songs made available for distribution on the Internet (see story, page 4).
The RIAA is also working on the formation of a new collecting body that aims to handle the performance royalties mandated under the U.S.' Digital Millennium Copyright Act to be paid by Webcasters to labels and artists. Dubbed SoundExchange, the project is expected to be officially announced in the coming weeks.
The global music industry already has a recorded-music ID system in place-the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), which was developed in 1989 and whose guidelines for use were revamped by the IFPI in 1998.
According to the RIAA, the new digital-file ID system is visualized as being "fully compatible" with the ISRC and other existing ID systems-by both building on and working with them. The new digital ID marks would be used to identify the song and artist in a music file and thus determine how royalties should be distributed.