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Free ISRC tool

Validate & decode
an ISRC

Paste an ISRC to check whether it's well-formed and break it down into its four parts — country, registrant, year, and designation. No account, no jargon.

Validate & decode an ISRC

Type or paste an ISRC. It's checked as you go — dashes and spaces are ignored — and decoded into its parts the moment it's valid.

Format checking happens in your browser. The optional catalog lookup searches 90M+ recordings.

The rules

What the validator checks

A well-formed ISRC follows four simple structural rules. The tool verifies each one and points to the first that fails.

LengthAn ISRC is exactly 12 characters once you drop the dashes — no more, no less.
Country codeThe first two characters must be letters — the code of the country where the ISRC was registered.
Registrant codeCharacters three to five are letters or digits, identifying the label or issuer.
Year & designationThe final seven characters must all be digits: two for the year, five for the recording's number.
Anatomy

How an ISRC decodes

Every ISRC is four fields joined together — for example US-RC1-76-07839. The validator splits any valid code into exactly these parts.

US-
Country
Where the code was registered — here, the United States.
RC1-
Registrant
The label or issuer that registered the recording.
76-
Year
The two-digit year of reference.
07839
Designation
A unique number for this recording within that year.
Reading the country code

What the country code actually tells you

The first two letters are the country where the ISRC was registered — not where the artist is from, and not where the recording was made.

Most codes are standard two-letter country codes (US, GB, NL). A few are special allocations from the International ISRC Agency: QM, QT, and QZ are US codes issued when the country's registrant pool ran low — you'll see them on releases from distributors like TuneCore and CD Baby — while TC and ZZ denote international repertoire. The decoder names the country for you and flags these special cases.

Watch out

Common ISRC mistakes

Counting the dashes

Dashes and spaces are only for readability. US-RC1-76-07839 and USRC17607839 are the same 12-character code.

Letter O vs zero

The registrant can contain letters, but the last seven characters are always digits — a stray letter O where a 0 belongs is the most common typo.

Confusing it with a UPC or ISWC

A UPC is the numeric barcode for a whole release; an ISWC (starting with T) is the composition code. Only the ISRC identifies one recording.

Assuming the country is the artist's

The country code is where the code was registered by the label — not where the artist is from or where the track was made.

Confident it's valid and want the song behind it? Use the free ISRC lookup tool, or cross to the composition with the ISRC ⇄ ISWC converter.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

A valid ISRC is exactly 12 characters: two letters for the country, three letters or digits for the registrant, then seven digits (two for the year of reference and five for the designation). Dashes are optional and only added for readability. This tool checks each of those rules and tells you which one fails if the code is malformed.
No — this is a format check, not a registration check. A code can be perfectly well-formed and still have never been assigned to a real recording. To find out whether a code actually exists, use the 'Look this up in the catalog' button: it checks the ISRC against SonoVault's catalog of 90M+ recordings and shows the track if we hold it.
Country (2 letters) — where the ISRC was registered. Registrant (3 characters) — the label or issuer that registered it. Year (2 digits) — the year of reference, not necessarily the recording or release year. Designation (5 digits) — a unique number that registrant assigned to the recording within that year.
QM, QT, and QZ are special allocations the International ISRC Agency made to the United States when the country's registrant codes ran low. They're common on ISRCs minted by distributors like TuneCore and CD Baby. The code is still valid — it just isn't a normal ISO country code.
Not usually. The country code reflects where the label or distributor registered the ISRC, which is often wherever that company is based — not the artist's nationality or where the recording was made. A track by a European artist released through a US distributor commonly carries a US (or QM/QZ) code.
This tool checks one code at a time. To validate and resolve codes in bulk, the SonoVault API accepts up to 100 ISRCs per call and returns the canonical recording plus cross-platform links for each — behind one API key, with a free tier for low volumes.

Validate ISRCs at scale?

Validate and resolve up to 100 ISRCs per call through the SonoVault API — each one returned with its canonical recording and cross-platform IDs, behind one API key.

ISRC lookup for developersView the API docs →