The Global Release Identifier (GRid) is a system to identify releases of digital

Digital

A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...

 sound recordings (and other digital data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

) for electronic distribution. It is designed to be integrated with identification systems deployed by key stakeholders from across the music industry.

Basic construction

A GRid consists of 18 alphanumeric

Alphanumeric

Alphanumeric is a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters, and is used to describe the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits or a text constructed from this collection. There are either 36 or 62 alphanumeric characters. The alphanumeric character set consists of the numbers 0 to...

al character

Character (computing)

In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....

s (numerical digit

Numerical digit

A digit is a symbol used in combinations to represent numbers in positional numeral systems. The name "digit" comes from the fact that the 10 digits of the hands correspond to the 10 symbols of the common base 10 number system, i.e...

s and capital letters as defined in ISO/IEC 646

ISO/IEC 646

ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO standard that since its first edition in 1972 has specified a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived...

:1991-IRV, which is identical to ASCII) that are grouped into four elements as follows:

Identifier Scheme element (2 characters): “A1” denotes a GRid.
Issuer Code element (5 characters): A unique identifier of the organisation responsible for allocating the GRid, issued by the International GRid Authority (i.e., the IFPI

IFPI

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...

).
Release Number element (10 characters): Uniquely identifies the specific bundle of digital resources compiled by the issuer, where “a digital resource is a digital fixation of an expression of an abstract work, such as a sound recording, an audio-visual recording, a photograph, software, a graphic image or a passage of text.”
Check Character element (1 character): The check character

Check digit

A check digit is a form of redundancy check used for error detection, the decimal equivalent of a binary checksum. It consists of a single digit computed from the other digits in the message....

 is computed according to ISO 7064:1983 Mod 37, 36.

When a GRid is written, printed or otherwise visually presented, the four elements of the
GRid should be separated from each other by a hyphen

Hyphen

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...

. For clarity, it can also be prefix

Substring

A subsequence, substring, prefix or suffix of a string is a subset of the symbols in a string, where the order of the elements is preserved...

ed with “GRid:”. Neither the hyphens nor the “GRid:”-prefix form part of
the GRid. It is recommended that when a GRid is visually presented, the font used should
clearly distinguish between the digit

Numerical digit

A digit is a symbol used in combinations to represent numbers in positional numeral systems. The name "digit" comes from the fact that the 10 digits of the hands correspond to the 10 symbols of the common base 10 number system, i.e...

s ‘1’ and ‘0’ on the one hand, and the letter

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

s ‘I’ and ‘O’ on the other hand.

The following character string

String (computer science)

In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet....

s all denote the same GRid:

• A12425GABC1234002M
• A1-2425G-ABC1234002-M
• GRid:A1-2425G-ABC1234002-M

Where:

• A1 – Identifier Scheme element
• 2425G – Issuer Code element
• ABC1234002 – Release Number element
• M – Check Character element

External links

• GRid home page of the IFPI
  IFPI
  The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a not-for-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland...
  
  
• Grid Standard
• Grid Standard V2.1