Guides
The CWR glossary
The vocabulary of music registration, in plain words.
CWR
Common Works Registration — the CISAC standard file format publishers use to register musical works with societies. Versions 2.1 and 2.2 are in production use.
Society / PRO / CMO
The organizations that license music use and pay rightsholders: performing rights organizations (ASCAP, PRS…), mechanical agencies (The MLC, CMRRA), and combined collective management organizations (GEMA, SACEM).
Performance rights (PR)
The right to perform a song publicly — radio, streaming, live, TV. Writers always keep at least 50% of performance ownership; the publisher's share is capped at 50%.
Mechanical rights (MR)
The right to reproduce a song — downloads, physical media, and the reproduction component of streaming.
Synchronisation (SR)
The right to pair a song with moving images — film, TV, ads, games. Licensed directly by publishers, not through societies.
Ownership share vs collection share
Ownership is who owns the song; collection is who picks up the money in a territory. A publisher may own 50% but collect 100% of the publisher-side money in a territory under a sub-publishing deal.
Chain of title
The linked path from each writer through the publishers who represent them — in CWR, writers (SWR), publishers (SPU), and the PWR records that connect them.
Interested party (IP)
Anyone with a stake in a work: writers and publishers. The 'IP number' in CWR is your own identifier for them; the IPI is the global one.
IPI
The international identifier for writers and publishers, maintained by SUISA for CISAC. A writer without an IPI is hard to pay.
ISWC
The International Standard Musical Work Code — the global identifier for the composition itself (T-XXX.XXX.XXX-C).
ISRC
The identifier for a specific recording of a work. One ISWC (song) can have many ISRCs (recordings).
TIS
CISAC's territory numbering: every country and region has a code. 2136 means 'the world'.
Sub-publisher
A local publisher appointed to represent your catalog in a territory — registering with the local society, collecting, and remitting, for a share.
Transaction
One registration inside a CWR file: a work header (NWR/REV) plus its detail lines. Files carry thousands.
Control totals
The counts a CWR file declares about itself (GRT and TRL records). If they don't match the contents, societies reject the file.
ACK
The acknowledgement file a society sends back: what was accepted, what was rejected, and why — per transaction.
Registration
Telling a society a work exists and who owns it, so usage can be matched and money paid. Not the same as copyright, which exists automatically.
Black box / unmatched royalties
Money collected for usage that couldn't be matched to a rightsholder — often because registrations were missing, late, or wrong.
Two free checks for your CWR file. Is the file correct? Every record, share and control total against the spec, each problem on its exact line. Do its writers match their registrations? Every writer cross-checked against public registration data, including works registered under another spelling or IPI. Nothing stored: check a file at cwrcheck.com.