YouTube To Assign ISNI IDs To All Musicians, Songwriters

YouTube has signed on to the global International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) initiative which assigns an ID to every creator, It is designed to make identification and therefore payments more accurate. YouTube is the first ISNI registration agency in the music space.

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YouTube has become a Registration Agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), the ISO certified global standard number for identifying millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution.

While YouTube is the first ISNI registration agency in the music sector, over 10 million ISNIs have been assigned to creators in other fields. 650,000 are assigned to organizations and more than 9.4 million to individuals.

"James Stewart, you say? Which one, there are at least 14 on YouTube!" says FX Nuttall, Technical Program Manager at YouTube. “By adopting ISNI, artists, songwriters and other creators will be unambiguously identified, enabling better visibility and tracking on YouTube. Bringing the ISNI open standard to music opens the door to more accurate credit for creators, discovery for fans, and transparency for the industry.”

How ISNI Works

YouTube will request an ISNI, a unique identifier, to be assigned to all creators whose works are used on the platform – including performers and songwriter. YouTube will then share ISNIs with its label and publishing partners in order to promote the adoption of this standard by the industry as a whole.

"ISNI’s mission is to assign to the public name(s) of a researcher, inventor, writer, artist, performer, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying number to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator, wherever that work is described."