Now-a-days among the population of indie artists trying to "get on", unfortunately for most of them the answer to this question is a big fat NO! But it's understandable. As an artist, I'm sure you'd love to only have to focus on your music but unless you have the budget to hire the right professionals to handle your business, you have to handle it yourself. With that said, here's 6 things you have to take care of before you're even adequately prepared for radio play and commercial distribution: 

1. ISRC
At Patchwerk, I swear, we get at least a handful of calls every day with artists that don't even know what an ISRC is, much less have one for their single. Why is this a problem....? Well particularly because you can ONLY encode an ISRC at the mastering stage of the recording/production process. That means you should technically have one to assign BEFORE you get your song mastered. So what's an ISRC? It stands for International Standard Recording Code. Every commercially released recording has one assigned to it for identification and tracking purposes. So if you don't have one, you won't be able to track your recordings. Get it? Now if you're fortunate enough to attract the interest of a radio DJ and they play your record on the radio, they will assign an ISRC for you but the problem is that it won't be associated with your name/company.

You can apply for an ISRC code at usisrc.org, but of course, they cost money. And because you will need multiple ISRCs (for each song you release) you may want to apply for a company account however that can be even more expensive. Lucky for you... a few companies, such as Patchwerk, offer to generate your ISRC codes for you. At #thepatch we only charge $15 to generate your own unique code and since we have your masters we go ahead and encode it during the mastering phase free of charge! Now, how's that for service?! :-)

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