Several of these depend on each other, and one of them depends on having already put music out. Doing them in the wrong order means sitting still.
The sequence
1. Decide the form, then create the entity. This is the one real decision, and everything downstream carries the answer. Get the constitution document: for a partnership, an executed deed.
2. Get the entity’s PAN. Nothing else can start without it.
3. Open a bank account in the label’s name. Needed for distribution payouts and for IPRS, which collects bank details as part of membership.
4. GST, when your position requires it. Driven by turnover and category rather than by wanting it. Worth noting that once you have it, the certificate becomes the address proof you will be asked for repeatedly.
5. Udyam, whenever. Optional, free, and out of the way.
6. Release music. This is the step people are surprised to find in the middle rather than at the end.
7. ISRC registrant code. Now it is possible, because the application requires artwork from several existing releases carrying your label’s branding. Before you have a catalogue, you cannot satisfy it.
8. IPRS membership. Needs the entity, PAN, bank account and released works, since only released works can be notified. Budget real time: there is a physical, signed stage.
9. Copyright filings, any time from step 2 onwards.
The two dependencies that catch people
ISRC needs a catalogue. Everyone assumes identifiers come first and music second. For your own registrant code it is the other way round: you need released work with your own artwork to apply at all. Early releases will therefore carry a distributor’s codes, and that is fine, those recordings keep them permanently either way.
IPRS needs released works. Same shape. Membership is not something to arrange in advance of having anything to notify.
Both mean the same thing in practice: release first, formalise second. The formal apparatus is built on evidence of activity, not the other way round.
The one thing worth doing early
Copyright filings do not wait for any of this. They need the entity as applicant and nothing more, and registration runs in months. Every week you delay a filing is a week added to the end, so as soon as the entity exists and a song is finished, file it.
That is the ordering mistake with the highest cost, not because anything blocks it, but because nothing does and people wait anyway.