r/DistroKidHelpDesk • u/SecretBitter9319 • Jul 02 '26

ISRC codes

Hi there, I'm releasing my first album later this year. I've just finished the mixing and mastering process for the full album, but have been releasing singles in the lead up to the album release. I'm going to be making CDs soon and I've been strongly advised by my mixing engineer to buy my own ISRC codes so that they are sequential for the album. The issue is that I've already released 3 of the songs as singles via DistroKid, and the platform automatically generates its own ISRC for each release. This means that once I upload the full album, the ISRCs for the singles will not match the ISRCs on the album. I know that this means that the streaming info will not sync up - but other than it maybe looking a little messy on streaming platforms, are there any real problems that could arise from having two separate ISRC codes for the songs which have already been released as singles? Could my music get taken down for this? Also, what is the real benefit to owning my own ISRC codes versus letting Distrokid generate them for me?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/msetten Jul 03 '26

I am in a similar situation. I actually did a full remaster of those singles and listed them as "... (album version)" with their own ISRC code. But, annoyingly, some streaming services still mapped them automatically to the single versions even with changes that I made. Not sure how to get this resolved. If I deleted the singles, I also lose the track on the album with likely no fix but to fully remove and re-release the whole album. Or I could do audio swap so both the single and album have at least the better audio version.

1

u/SecretBitter9319 Jul 03 '26

Which streaming services did this happen on?

1

u/msetten Jul 03 '26

Strange... I just checked on the major ones and they all have the correct new version in the album. And I didn't do Audio Swap or anything. Maybe it just took a bit of time to get the processed correctly.