GenderQueeries - SOCAN, Rights and Metadata

What is CanCon? More than you think!

To qualify as Canadian content a musical selection must generally fulfil at least two of the following conditions (or just one if recorded prior to January 1972)

M (music) — the music is composed entirely by a Canadian
A (artist) — the music is, or the lyrics are, performed principally by a Canadian
P (performance) — the musical selection consists of a performance that is:
- Recorded wholly in Canada, or
- Performed wholly in Canada and broadcast live in Canada.
L (lyrics) — the lyrics are written entirely by a Canadian

For the purposes of MAPL, a "Canadian" refers to a citizen, permanent resident, someone whose "ordinary place of residence" has been in Canada prior to their contribution to the musical selection, or someone who is a CRTC licensee.

A musical selection may also qualify as Canadian content if it:

Is an instrumental performance of a composition by a Canadian.
Is a "performance of a musical composition that a Canadian has composed for instruments only."
Was performed live or recorded after September 1, 1991, meets the criteria for either artist or performance, and a Canadian receives at least half of the credit for music and lyrics.

Registering with SOCAN

If you're signed to a label / PRO, they will handle this (truly annoying) bureaucracy for you. They usually can't be trusted to handle legal names properly, see below on how to fix it.

To become a SOCAN member, music creators must meet the following criteria:

Be a music composer, songwriter, producer or lyricist.
Have created a musical work or part of a musical work that has been:
- - Published by a music publisher; or
  - Recorded; or
  - Performed (or will be) in a public forum (i.e. radio, television, film, live performance, satellite radio, ringtone or internet) subject to licensing by SOCAN (i.e Coop Radio)

https://www.socan.com/sign-up-for-performing-rights/

Their form is pretty simple, but has been randomly broken for about the last 3 years. If you get an error after submitting everything, just wait a day and resubmit.

Canadians: How to change your name with SOCAN and ensure royalties continue

Change your name legally, wait for the legal name change certificate to arrive.
Contact SOCAN members@socan.com or call 1-866-307-6226. You'll send in a copy of your legal name change certificate.
Ask them to change your name and add a pseudonym to your account for your deadname to ensure royalties for old content still come to you. Pseudonyms will show ONLY in SOCAN's internal database.

Note that IPI pseudonyms are public and it's possible for people to figure out your deadname if your old work is accessible.

It's also a good idea to make sure your address is correct if you've moved recently and a few days after the change is submitted, verify your information has been updated at this link.

Note that SOCAN currently does not currently support diacritics and expanded character sets (such as Indigenous language characters), artist names are currently limited to 7 bit ASCII (0-9, A-Z with capitals letters only)

Metadata / MP3 Tags / Royalties

This is such a headache, but you're far more likely to get airplay on a bigger broadcast station / CBC if you include a ISWC code in the file metadata / your email to the radio show. The easiest way to set this up is for your performing rights organization / publisher to do it for you.

How Royalties Work

In Canada, SOCAN automatically receives metadata info from platforms (Census and CBC radio stations, internet and AV)

Your song plays, SOCAN gets a copy of the Title of the song, the ISWC code and the IPI number.

With "Survey" (smaller) stations like Coop Radio, the station is told to send in their logsheets for up to 14 days a year. SOCAN picks these dates. ISWC data might not be sent, so it's very important to make sure the show has your exact name as it is registered in SOCAN, or you may not get credit for the airplay.

We've had issues where we've played people's music but they hadn't updated their info in SOCAN (i.e. SOCAN only has their deadname)

On our log sheets, we write down your name, the song name and send that to SOCAN.
SOCAN doesn't know who you are if you don't have a pseudonym set up with them (see below)
You get NO credit for the airplay.

If you've had a lot of airplay that hasn't been recorded because of this, contact SOCAN - members@socan.com / 1-866-307-6226 ASAP

Definitions

ISWC - International Standard Musical Work Code - uniquely identifies a specific song, looks like T-345246800-1.
ISRC - International Standard Recording Code - uniquely identifies a specific recording of the song (to differentiate between a studio and live recording) Looks like "ISRC AA-6Q7-20-00047"
Interested Party Information (IPI) Number - Both ISWCs and IPI numbers are internationally-accepted codes attached to an underlying musical composition. But an ISWC refers to a song or score, whereas IPIs represent the entitled parties on that song or score – the songwriters, composers, publishers, etc. A song with multiple co-writers will have multiple IPI numbers connected to it. But it will only have one ISWC.

Don't know these numbers?

Your performing rights organization / publisher will have this info, or look it up with the appropriate CMO

Canadians - SOCAN
USA: ASCAP BMI
Europe-ish: SESAC

For best practices,

Include the ISRC code in the metadata. MP3 Tag is a free program that lets you do this, directions to set MP3Tag to do it are here.
Add the ISWC / IPI to the comment tag

Types of Radio Stations in Canada for Royalty Purposes

Census (RCEN): Census stations are defined as stations for which SOCAN receives 100% performance-data, including all stations monitored by Mediabase or Nielsen Broadcast Data Services (BDS) - This is most large stations
Survey (RSUR): Survey stations are defined as stations that SOCAN surveys for a 3 or 4 day period each quarter of the year, to a maximum of 14 days per year. These are typically smaller, indie stations (i.e. Coop Radio)
CBC (RCBC): CBC stations are defined as any local, regional or national CBC station across Canada. 100% performance data provided for the network and regional programming as well as sample for local programs.

Changing your name on your existing music

This is a huge clusterfuck.

ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, SOCAN are - and have historically been - a complete shitshow. The databases are a mess. There are frequently issues in data entry, the most common of which is that spaces are sometimes included in band names, and sometimes not (i.e. you'll see entries for both "GREEN DAY" and "GREENDAY")

On top of that, the performing rights organizations have historically refused to share their data with others without some sort of normally extremely expensive licensing.

So when geeks decided to identify music, they created their own thing. This did not help things.

The complete mess is why YouTube created its own Content ID system and why there will be more problems going forward as new platforms get created.

CD Related

TL;DR there isn't a single solution to fixing deadnames on CDs.

CD Text aka “put cd in an car cd player, or pre-internet connected CD player and the artist and song names pop up”
- Not changeable, your deadname appears because this was written to the disk.
  - Changing CD Text on home burned CDs is normally not possible (the disk must not be “finalized”) - even if you technically can, you’ll frequently cause play issues, so the "solution" for deadnames is to toss burned CDs, reburn.
- CD Text is almost NEVER read by computers or CD ripping software.
- If you use a CD to CD copier, CD Text is often not supported.

“CDDB” aka “ the thing that gets artist and track names when you rip a CD on a computer”
- If you toss a CD in from a trans artist pre-transition, it'll almost always auto populate with the old name.
- How it works:

Your computer reads the CD and submits the number of tracks and the length of each track to an online server. No audio is sent.
The server responds with a list of possible albums, there can be - and often are - multiple albums with the same number of tracks and track lengths. Because many of these projects rely on user submitted data and don't really do any verification, it's common to see duplicate

- The incredibly complex history:
  - It was originally a project known as CDDB, started in 1993.
  - CDDB went corporate, renamed itself Gracenote in 1999 and in one of the most scummy moves of all time, placed nearly a decade of community contributed information behind a paywall.
  - Numerous groups were incredibly pissed by this, so they used archives of CDDB data and created forks (or "their version" of CDDB) These are some, but not all of the forks
    - GnuDB (most popular current database) - updates may be possibly by contacting info@gnudb.org
    - AllMusic / Xperi (formerly known as TiVo) - https://www.allmusic.com/data-corrections
      - Windows Media Player used AllMusic for CD identification
      - Some e-commerce sites use it, but generally the e-commerce sites don't apply updates to existing data, so you have to contact each Allmusic licensee
    - MusicBrainz - support@metabrainz.org
      - Seem to have fairly trans hostile policies.
    - Neilsen
      - The "official" one - CDDB -> CDDB Inc. -> Gracenote, in June 2008, Sony Corporation of America bought Gracenote. In 2014 Tribune Media Services (TMS) acquired Gracenote from Sony, and then sold it to Nielsen in December 2016.
      - Used by iTunes CD Ripping but NOT Apple Music (and pretty much nobody else)
      - https://www.nielsen.com/about-us/press-contacts/
    - FreeDB (dead but their database was copied by many) - no updates possible.
    - Others - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_music_databases

Streaming

Generally speaking, the platforms do not want to hear from you as a person - and will not change names, etc, at your request.

if you're with Distrokid or a similar company, contact them, ask them to change your name with the platforms. This does not work reliably, but will work for some streaming platforms.

Apple Music
Apple is currently - by far - the worst platform for trans people, with openly hostile policies and Apple ignoring trans people's legal name changes as a matter of corporate policy.
- In July 2023 Apple announced artist name changes will no longer be processed.
- Apple is extremely militant about this, and as of 2025, asking about the name change policy in Apple support forums will result in your post being automatically locked and a chance that your account banned.
- The Apple “recommended” solution is to delete all of your tracks, delete your account, re-upload everything. This will remove songs from other's playlists, (removing the song from user’s playlists, resetting plays, etc)

But removing your existing work from Apple is NOT actually a solution.

According to Distrokid, removing your music from Apple Music and then reuploading WILL result in Apple removing your new uploads from their service (Archived from 2025-02-18)

- You will probably want to edit the music slightly to try and defeat Apple’s audio fingerprinting.
- Solution: Human rights complaint or legal action. Apple will likely settle to avoid setting precedent on this.

Spotify
- Changing Artist Name

You can’t manually change your artist name on Spotify. We display the artist name in the metadata delivered to us.

To change your artist name, ask your label or distributor to submit a metadata update to us, listing your new name in each of your releases.

Your label or distributor should also inform our Content Operations team about the name change.

Once we receive the update, a new artist profile will be automatically created for you with your rebranded releases. Your play counts will be retained, and your Monthly Listeners will recover with time.

YouTube
- Change your Channel Name
- If your work has been determined to be the "authoritative" version of a video in Youtube's content ID database, it appears to be difficult to change this. Your deadname will be used even when other people / organizations copyright claim or copyright strike music - a more in depth explanation of this here. Again, legal action appears to be the only way to change this.

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What is CanCon? More than you think!

Registering with SOCAN

Canadians: How to change your name with SOCAN and ensure royalties continue

Metadata / MP3 Tags / Royalties

Changing your name on your existing music

CD Related

Streaming

Apple Music

Spotify

YouTube

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