Answers/Getting paid/Where to Find Your ISRC, ISWC and UPC (Every Lookup Route)

Getting paid

Where to Find Your ISRC, ISWC and UPC (Every Lookup Route)

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 4, 2026·Getting paid

Every time I have needed one of these codes it has been because something was already broken. A royalty line I could not identify. An MLC work registration that would not accept my recordings. A Content ID claim I had to answer with proof. Nobody emails you your ISRC. Nobody tells you the UPC exists. You go looking for them under pressure, and the search terms people type — "find my upc code", "where to find iswc" — are exactly what that pressure sounds like.

This page is the retrieval guide. If you want the conceptual version — what each code is, why there are three of them, what breaks when they are wrong — that is on ISRC vs ISWC: the two codes your song needs. This one is about where yours physically live.

Where do I find my ISRC, ISWC and UPC?

Here is the whole thing in one table. Everything after this is detail on each row.

The pattern is worth naming before the detail. Two of these codes are recording-side and one is composition-side, and they are held by completely different organisations. Your distributor knows your ISRC and your UPC and has never heard of your ISWC. Your PRO knows your ISWC and does not issue the other two. No single login shows you all three, which is why the answer to "where is my code" depends entirely on which code you mean.

Where do I find my ISRC?

Route one, and the one that works for almost everybody: your distributor dashboard. Open the release, open the track, and the ISRC is on the track's detail. DistroKid states plainly that it "has been appointed by the US ISRC Agency to assign ISRCs" and generates them automatically and free for every song. TuneCore and CD Baby do the same at upload. You did not choose to have an ISRC; you got one the moment you distributed.

Route two: your distributor's export. DistroKid's Vault holds your uploaded audio and artwork "and additional data such as DistroKid ISRCs and DistroKid UPCs". If you have twenty releases, pull the export rather than clicking through twenty release pages.

Route three: the delivered metadata. The ISRC is embedded in the audio your distributor delivered, which means Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists surface it per track for verified artists. Handy as a cross-check when you suspect the distributor and the store disagree.

Route four, for when you have lost access to the account: the SoundExchange ISRC lookup at isrc.soundexchange.com. This is the one worth understanding properly, because the search term people use — "soundexchange isrc search" — leads to the wrong place.

The US ISRC Agency, which is the RIAA, requires every ISRC manager to "provide SoundExchange (which has been designated as the authoritative source for ISRC data in the US and operates a lookup service for ISRCs) the ISRC data that they have assigned to sound recordings and/or music videos." That is a reporting obligation on your distributor, not a favour. It is why a code assigned to you years ago by a distributor you no longer use should still be findable.

The RIAA links to that lookup from usisrc.org under the label "Check ISRCs on SoundExchange". The address is isrc.soundexchange.com — a separate subdomain. When I checked on 4 September 2026, soundexchange.com/isrc-search/ returned a placeholder page reading "This content is not ready yet". If you searched for the SoundExchange ISRC search and landed on a dead page, that is why, and the tool is not gone.

Separately, SoundExchange's own site says its app lets artists "search and claim their recordings, track their catalog, and review their digital royalty payments" — that is a claiming tool for your own repertoire, which is a different job from looking a code up, and both are worth having open when you are cleaning up a catalogue.

Where do I find my UPC?

DistroKid's help centre gives the whole procedure in three steps: sign into DistroKid, click on the release you want the UPC for, and read the UPC displayed there. TuneCore and CD Baby put it in the same place — the release-level information, not the track.

The important thing about a UPC is that it is a product identifier that happens to be used for music. It is not a music standard. It is a GS1 standard, the same one on a can of soup, and that is why the answer to "where do I get one" changes depending on whether you want to own it.

If your distributor issued it, you are effectively borrowing a number from their range. That is fine for almost everyone and costs nothing — DistroKid says explicitly that it generates ISRCs and UPCs automatically and free. The tradeoff is that the number is tied to their prefix rather than to you.

If you want your own, you buy it from GS1 US. Their pricing, published on their "How to Get a UPC Barcode" page and retrieved 4 September 2026:

GS1 US notes that the single GTIN "is not available to identify pharmaceutical products, variable measure products or mixed cases, or to create coupons", and that it comes with a free lifetime subscription to GS1 US Data Hub, which is where the number lives once you have it.

For a musician releasing a handful of singles a year, buying your own UPC is almost never worth $30 a release when your distributor gives you one for nothing. It becomes worth it if you press physical product, sell through retail channels that care who the brand owner is, or run a small label issuing releases for other artists.

There is no dependable free public lookup that turns a music UPC back into a release. The consumer barcode-scanner sites are user-submitted and incomplete. If you have a UPC and need to know what it is, the distributor who issued it is the answer.

Where do I find my ISWC?

This is the one that genuinely lives somewhere else, and the one people most often cannot find because it may not exist yet.

An ISWC is not issued at distribution. CISAC's guidance for creators and publishers is specific: ISWCs are allocated "as soon as Creators and Publishers register their works with a Registration Agency", and allocation requires that "complete metadata must be provided, including the Original Title and the IPI Name Numbers and Roles of all creators included in the work", and that "at least one of the creators must be affiliated to the Registration Agency".

Read that as a checklist, because it explains most missing ISWCs:

1. Was the work registered at all? Distributing a song is not registering a composition. If you have never filed a work registration at ASCAP, BMI or SESAC, there is no ISWC to find.
2. Is every writer listed with their IPI number and role? A co-writer entered as a name with no IPI is incomplete metadata.
3. Is at least one writer affiliated with the society you registered at? A work registered by an unaffiliated party can stall.

Once it exists, here is where to look:

• Your PRO's members area. The ISWC appears against the work in your works catalogue at ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. This is the authoritative copy for your own songs.
• ASCAP Repertory Search, which is public and no login is needed. It searches by title, performer, writer, publisher, work ID or ISWC, so it works in both directions — code to song, or song to code. ASCAP describes it as showing results from Songview, "a shared view of works in the ASCAP and BMI repertories", so a single search covers both of the big US societies.
• ISWC Net, CISAC's international system, when a work has been registered outside the US or you need the global record.
• The MLC's Public Search, free and login-free, which shows registered works and is the place to confirm that what your PRO thinks is true has actually arrived at the organisation paying your US mechanicals.

CISAC also runs allocation and resolution services — the ISWC Allocation Service and the ISWC Resolution Service — but those are publisher-facing, accessed through your society of affiliation, and not a route an independent artist needs.

Which lookup should I use for which problem?

What is the audit I would run before I need any of this?

Do this once, calmly, rather than at the point where money is already stuck.

1. Build one spreadsheet, one row per recording. Columns: title, artist as credited, release date, distributor, ISRC, release UPC, the composition it is a recording of, and the ISWC of that composition.
2. Fill in ISRC and UPC from your distributor. Use the export if there is one rather than clicking through.
3. Fill in ISWC from your PRO's works catalogue. Every blank cell here is either an unregistered work or an incomplete registration — investigate rather than ignoring.
4. Verify each work in ASCAP Repertory Search. Confirm the writers, the shares and the ISWC match what you believe.
5. Verify each work in The MLC's Public Search and confirm your ISRCs are attached to it. This is the step that decides whether US mechanicals reach you.
6. Spot-check two or three ISRCs in the SoundExchange lookup to confirm your distributor's reporting actually happened.
7. Keep the spreadsheet where you control it, not inside a distributor account you might cancel. The reason these codes are hard to find is that the systems holding them are ones you can lose access to.

If you want the ordering of registrations that this audit assumes, that is the 90-minute royalty registration checklist. If you want to know why a wrong code silently stops payment rather than throwing an error, that is why your royalties are sitting unclaimed.

I am an artist who maintains my own catalogue's registrations, not a lawyer or an accountant. Registry addresses, dashboard layouts and GS1 pricing change — the figures and URLs above are what I confirmed on 4 September 2026, and worth re-checking at the source before you act on them.