When your song is streamed, the royalty payment passes through several systems before it reaches you.
ICE (International Copyright Enterprise) is a joint venture between PRS, STIM (Sweden) and GEMA (Germany). It processes digital performing and mechanical royalties for major streaming services across multiple European territories. ICE maintains a shared database of musical works and handles the matching of streams to compositions – connecting the recording that was played (identified by its ISRC) to the underlying song (identified by its ISWC and registered ownership data).
When ICE processes a stream correctly, the royalty is allocated to the right writers and publishers and distributed through their home societies. When data is missing or conflicting – a misspelled name, a missing co-writer, an unregistered work – the payment can be delayed or lost. Problems in ICE can affect income across all ICE territories at once.
CWR (Common Works Registration) is the industry-standard format that publishers use to register musical works with collecting societies worldwide. It allows a UK publisher to file your work with societies in any territory using a standardised data format.
CWR has known limitations. It was designed in the 1990s as a text-based system and struggles with some modern metadata requirements. It has no mechanism for publishers to formally notify societies when they no longer control a work – which can mean your former publisher continues receiving royalties after a deal ends, until a new registration triggers a conflict. Self-published writers cannot use CWR directly; it is a publisher-to-society system.
