Registering a catalogue — CWR or a spreadsheet
Two ways to get works into a rights management system, what each one is good for, and the metadata mistakes that cost the most to fix later.
There are two realistic ways to get a catalogue registered: a CWR file, or a spreadsheet. Which one you should use depends less on the size of the catalogue than on where the data currently lives.
CWR, when the data is already in a system
CWR — Common Works Registration — is the industry’s file format for registering works. If your catalogue already sits in a publishing administration system, that system can almost certainly export CWR, and that is the path with the fewest hands on the data.
Two versions are in circulation:
- CWR 2.1 is still the most widely supported.
- CWR 2.2 carries more information per work, and we recommend it when your system can produce it — more fields declared up front means fewer conflicts later.
A spreadsheet, when it does not
Plenty of catalogues live in a spreadsheet, or in someone’s head, or across a folder of PDF split sheets. That is not a problem; it is the normal state of an independent catalogue. Our CSV template exists for exactly this, and it asks for the fields that matter rather than every field CWR can express.
The mistakes that are expensive later
Registration errors are cheap to fix on the way in and expensive afterwards, because by then reports have already failed to match against them.
Shares that do not total 100%. Usually a rounding artefact, or a co-writer whose share was agreed verbally and never written down. Either way the work cannot be paid out cleanly until it is resolved.
Writers identified by stage name only. Platforms report what they were given. If a work is registered to a stage name and a report arrives with a legal name, that is a conflict. Declare both.
Missing IPI numbers. The IPI identifies the rights holder. Without it, two writers with the same common name are indistinguishable, and a share can be attributed to the wrong person.
Alternate titles left out. Translated titles, the version with the featured artist appended, the title without the parenthetical. Each one is how some platform will report your work.
Silence about existing agreements. If a work is co-published, or was previously administered elsewhere for a territory, that shapes what can be claimed and where. Declare it at registration.
What happens after you send it
The catalogue is loaded, works are matched against what already exists in the wider infrastructure, and anything that needs an ISWC or an IPI is put forward for one. Whatever does not resolve automatically goes to a conflicts queue with a person attached to it.
You will see the state of every work in your portal, including the ones still unresolved. That is deliberate: the unmatched list is the useful one.