McFreedom

So, the music industry is finally coming up with a UPC-like standard for online music sales. We wrestled with this at EMusic; we did deals to license our music to other sites, and we needed a universal tracking number that wouldn't collide with other music providers' numbers. We started out using the UPC, but ran into a number of problems.

It went smoothly, at first. A UPC is a six-digit manufacturer identification number, followed by a "class" digit, followed by a four-digit item number, followed by a a single checksum digit. This gave us 9,999 UPCs from our initial signup.

Since we assigned one UPC to the album and one UPC to each song on the album, each album used, on average, 13 UPCs. After only 769 albums, we ran out.

As a temporary solution, we overflowed our manufacturer's ID number, and called the Uniform Commercial Council, the folks who dole these numbers out. We'd figured that you could get all the music market that mattered with about 400,000 songs, so we said, "We'd really like to have about 400,000 UPCs." They replied, "You understand, right, that if you have a bin of screws, you put one UPC on the bin, not one UPC on every screw?" We explained that we got that, but that we really, actually were going to need 400,000 unique identifiers someday (by the time I departed, we needed about 125,000). UCC's answer? "We don't think UPC is a solution for you." We ended up just using our own, internal SKUs.

Looks like they told the RIAA the same thing. And, believe it or not, the RIAA's solution is cheaper. 400,000 numbers from the UCC would cost about $10,000, but the RIAA solution apparently will handle "millions" of songs for $250.