What Is an IPI Number, and How Do You Find Yours?

An IPI number is the number collecting societies use to decide who gets paid for a song. Every songwriter, composer and publisher registered at a society has one. When a song is registered, each writer is listed by name and IPI number, and the number is what the societies' systems match on. It is what actually connects a stream in Brazil or a radio play in Germany to your bank account.

You get one when you join a performing rights organization. You find it in your society account or in a public repertory search. And you treat it like a bank account number: copied, never retyped.

What the letters mean

IPI stands for Interested Party Information. It is a shared database of everyone who holds a stake in musical works, run by the Swiss society SUISA under the standards of CISAC, the international confederation of collecting societies. ASCAP, BMI, PRS, SACEM, GEMA and the rest all read from the same system, which is why one number works across borders.

You will still see the older name, CAE number (compositeur, auteur, éditeur). It is the same identifier under its old label. If a form asks for "CAE/IPI", it wants your IPI.

Base number vs name number

The IPI system gives each person two kinds of number, and the difference matters more than it looks.

• IPI base number. One per person or company, assigned automatically. It identifies you.
• IPI name number. One per name you are known by. Your legal name has one, and a pen name or a former name registered at the society gets its own.

When a society, publisher or administrator asks for "your IPI", they almost always mean the name number for the name on your registrations. It is eleven digits long. Society screens often drop any zeros at the front, so 00123456789 and 123456789 are the same number. The last two digits are check digits calculated from the first nine, which is how software can tell that a number was mistyped.

How to find your IPI number

At ASCAP: sign in to Member Access. Your IPI number is on your member profile.

At BMI: sign in to Online Services and choose the IPI Number option. BMI's own FAQ warns that your BMI account number is not your IPI number, and that putting the account number on a registration is a mistake.

Without logging in: search your legal name as a writer in Songview, the joint ASCAP and BMI repertory search. The IPI number shows next to the writer's name. Start with your legal name, since that is the name on your membership; a pen name you registered with the society can be searched too.

Outside the US: most societies show it in the member portal, usually on the profile page, sometimes labelled CAE/IPI.

If none of these turns up a number, check that your membership actually went through, because a writer is given an IPI on joining. Joining ASCAP or BMI as a writer is free, and the number is assigned when the membership goes through. Our guide to performing rights organizations covers how to pick one.

Publishers have their own IPI

A publisher is an interested party too, so it has its own IPI number, separate from yours. When a song is registered, the writer line carries the writer's IPI and the publisher line carries the publisher's. At performing rights societies, that is the split behind the writer share and the publisher share: two halves, paid to two identities.

If you self-publish and use an administrator, the administrator registers its own publisher IPI on your works and collects the publisher half for you. You do not need to set up a publishing company to get your publisher share paid.

IPI, ISWC and ISRC are three different things

People mix these up because all three show up on the same forms.

A song has one ISWC, many recordings each have their own ISRC, and every writer on the song is identified by an IPI. Our ISWC vs ISRC explainer goes deeper on the last two.

The one-digit mistake

Here is our opinion, and it comes from cleaning up real catalogs: the IPI number is the most important number a songwriter owns, and the one most often typed carelessly.

A wrong IPI is rarely caught at the moment you register. Sometimes the society rejects the work weeks later. Sometimes the work is accepted under the wrong identity and the money sits unmatched. In one catalog we took on, a writer's number had a single wrong digit, and the society refused it on more than 260 works. None of those songs can pay that writer until the number is corrected and the works are filed again, and the royalties wait the whole time.

Three habits prevent this:

• Copy it from the society's own page, never from an old email or a split sheet someone else filled in.
• Use the name number for the name on the registration. If you write under a pen name registered at the society, that name has its own number.
• Put it on every split sheet. Our split sheet template has a line for it, so co-writers' numbers are collected while everyone is still in the room.

How Davincii uses your IPI

When you sign up, we ask for your society and your IPI number, and we file exactly the number you give us. Our forms check the two check digits when you save the number, so most typos are caught before they reach a registration. If a society still disputes a number, we ask you for the right one rather than guessing.

There is no upfront fee, and you keep 100% of your copyright. We take a commission only on royalties we collect. If you want to see how registering a song works end to end, start there.