Adding Aliases & Society Identifiers

When importing income files to Curve, we will aim to map this income to the correct Work in your catalogue using the Identifier or ISWC as a reference. If the values found in the income file are an exact match with the Main Identifier or ISWC field in your Work, the income will automatically map to this Work.

It is of course very common for societies or sub-publishers to account income to your with their own internal song Identifiers. These alternative Identifiers can be stored as a Society Identifier or Alias on the Work. The one difference between Society Identifiers and Aliases is that Society Identifiers will only be used by Curve when the importing Template Source is an exact match to that of the Identifier Source. Whereas an Alias can be used to map income to Works at all times, regardless of the Template Source. Most commonly, you will be adding Society Identifiers using the Unmapped page.

In the below example, the identifier TB123452 will only be used when the Template Source is PRS, whereas 54126162 can be used for income from any Source.

The Template Source

The Template Source is thus an important field in your Templates. When creating new Templates, it is best practice to remain consistent in your Template Source choice. When updating the Template Source from PRS to Performance Rights Organisation, those Society Identifiers mapped to PRS would no longer be in use.

As a pro tip, if multiple Societies use the same identifiers, it is best to store their separate Templates under the same Template Source. In the UK for example, both PRS and MCPS use the same identifiers, and using the Template Source PRS for both templates will make sure we would only have to map unknown identifiers once, rather than once per Template Source.

Adding Aliases and Society Identifiers in Bulk

As shown, it is possible to manually add Aliases or Society Identifiers to the Works via the interface. A more common workflow would be to add these identifiers via the Mapping Manager or Unmapped page as you are importing your income and validating the income lines. If you make use of our CWR Deliveries tool to deliver your Works to societies, then we'll automatically pick up the Society Identifiers that are provided in the Acknowledgement files which they return.

Another option to include these Aliases or Identifiers would be to import them in bulk using an excel template. For this, you can go to the Unmapped page, select the "Import Aliases" button on the top right of your screen, and then select which type of identifier you are looking to upload. When selecting "Download Template", you will receive an excel template which can be used to specify the Aliases and Identifiers you wish to add. You can then import this back into Curve via the Import button in that same view.