IPI number

An IPI identifies an interested party — a songwriter, composer, lyricist or publisher — in the international registration systems. Names are not unique and are spelled inconsistently across territories; the IPI is what makes a share in a work attach to a specific person or company rather than to a string of text.

It is an eleven-digit number, held for life, and it replaced the older CAE numbering system, which is why the two terms are still used interchangeably by people who have been doing this a while. A writer has one IPI as a writer. Someone who also operates as a publisher will hold a separate IPI in that capacity: the number identifies a role as well as a party, so the same human can legitimately appear twice in a registration.

You get one by affiliating with a performing rights society. The society allocates the number and maintains the entry in the international database. You do not apply for an IPI independently, and you should not end up with two — duplicate IPIs for the same party fragment a catalogue across records that then have to be merged.

The practical importance shows up on split sheets and registrations. A split sheet listing four writers by professional name is much weaker than one listing legal names, societies and IPIs, because the registration downstream needs exactly those fields. Where a co-writer's IPI is missing or wrong, their share of the work cannot be confidently matched, and the income for it may be held rather than paid.

The same discipline applies to publishers. A publisher-of-record entry with the wrong IPI misroutes the publisher's share just as effectively as a wrong writer entry misroutes the writer's.