Membership admits you. It does not tell the society what to collect on, that is a separate step, and it has two constraints worth knowing before you start filling rows.
Only released works
The notification form is for released works only, and submissions are subject to verification against supporting material.
So the sequence runs one way: finish the recording, release it, then notify. A song sitting unreleased in your catalogue has nothing to notify, however finished it is. That is a scheduling fact worth building into a release plan rather than discovering at the end of one.
What each row asks for
Per work: song name, film or album name, language, category, artists and singers, composer, lyricist, publisher, a digital link to the released recording, and the release year.
Two of those repay attention.
The digital link means the notification is verifiable against something public. It also means the release has to actually be live and findable.
Composer, lyricist and publisher are the same facts your copyright filings record, and if the two disagree, you have created a discrepancy across two systems about the same song. Work from one source of truth for who did what, and use it for both.
Getting it wrong has a specific consequence
The form is explicit: the member filling it in is solely responsible for the details, indemnifies the society against future inconsistency, and where a discrepancy is later observed the society may hold the work and place it on a dispute list until it is resolved.
A work on a dispute list is a work that is not paying out. That is the cost of a careless row, and it is why “we will tidy the metadata later” is a bad plan here specifically.
Where this sits relative to everything else
Three systems, three jobs, and it is worth keeping them straight:
| Records | Body | |
|---|---|---|
| Copyright registration | authorship and ownership | Copyright Office |
| ISRC | the identity of a recording | IMI |
| Work notification | what the society collects on | IPRS |
None of them substitutes for another, and the same underlying facts feed all three. Getting them from one place is the only way they stay consistent.
Up: Royalties & IPRS.