An Interested Party Information (IPI) number is a unique, international identification number, usually 9–11 digits long. IPIs are assigned to songwriters, composers and music publishers.

Most of the world’s performing rights organizations (including ASCAP) use IPI numbers to link you to your musical works, so we can track performances of your music and pay royalties to the right people. IPI numbers are helpful for distinguishing you from all the other music writers and publishers throughout the world. For example, let’s say you write a song with someone who has a common name, like Pat Smith. You can make sure you have the right Pat Smith by searching by Pat’s IPI number when you’re registering the song with ASCAP.

An IPI number is immediately assigned when you join ASCAP. You will find it listed in your Member Access account. Please note that IPI numbers aren’t assigned by ASCAP – they are assigned on behalf of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC).

Whenever you register your music with ASCAP, make sure to include your IPI number. Send your IPI number to your collaborators, and make sure you get theirs, too. This ensures that you’re always adding the correct entitled party to your registration.

ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is an ISO standard, in use by numerous libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management organizations around the world. It is used to uniquely identify persons and organizations involved in creative activities, as well as public personas of both, such as pseudonyms, stage names, record labels or publishing imprints. As an open standard, ISNI is not a proprietary "walled garden" - it is diffused widely on the open web, and is a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

The ISNI database is populated from many data sources worldwide, and based on linking through matching algorithms. ISNI identifiers ("ISNIs") are assigned when there is a high level of confidence in matching new names to existing names in the database or when sufficiently rich metadata is available to determine that the new name does not yet exist in the ISNI database.