The Creative Passport is a verified digital ID for music makers,  where they can access, update and manage verified information about themselves and their works, and share it with others. Spearheaded by Imogen Heap, it is the first music service / product born out of Mycelia, a not for profit think-and do-tank driven by a community of creatives, technologists and industry champions.

The Creative Passport is a free web application that is available to any music maker / creator who wants to sign up to it. To sign up, you just need to log into www.app.creativepassport.net.

There are a number of things that set The Creative Passport apart from what others are doing:

– It is spearheaded by music maker Imogen Heap and is being developed in collaboration with other music makers – this provides very real insights into the challenges that artists face

– It is currently the only offering for music makers where data is owned, verified and controlled by them

– Any profits generated through The Creative Passport go directly to the music makers

– It is platform agnostic

The Creative Passport is currently in its beta  phase so we are rolling it out steadily to the community of music makers. You can see how many people are using it worldwide on map.creativepassport.net

The Creative Passport is a one-stop-shop for music makers that allows them to upload, verify and manage profile information, IDs, acknowledgements, works and business partnerships. Owned collectively by the artists who hold their data there, it connects artists to all music related services.

Imogen Heap founded The Creative Passport in collaboration with a community of creatives, technologists and industry champions. Together we are actively working with other music makers to continue to evolve The Creative Passport so that it meets both the needs of the artists and the industry.

One of the key features of The Creative Passport is that it enables businesses to use verified artist data within their services through secure APIs connections. This means that the information provided and shared is always up to date and 100% correct.

Music makers can verify their government identity with our verification partners YOTI.

If you are a musician and you are a member of PPL (UK collection society for performing rights for performing artists, musicians and  producers), you can verify an important industry identifier called IPN.

Music makers are able to create a public visualisation of their Creative Passport as a shareable link.

Future features will include secure chat function between passport holders, research portal, further data categories, Band ID, importing credits and integration with third party services.

No. We have deliberately designed it to be a free service for music makers. It may be that we decide to add some additional features in the future for which we will charge a nominal sum, however the core functionalities of the platform will remain free of charge.

To access The Creative Passport, you need to log on to app.creativepassport.net.

Our plan is to continue innovating so that we can deliver a fully-fledged service that meets the ongoing needs of the music maker and music services. Part of this will include working very closely with creatives in addition to growing the number of service providers which plug into the platform. We are also aiming to continue to grow our user base so that it becomes the recognized global digital identity standard for music makers.

The Creative Passport is currently available worldwide.

The global music industry currently generates billions in revenue each year with up to 50% payments not making it to their rightful owners due to ageing and stretched systems, missing information and incorrect data. This means that each year, millions of artists are losing out. In addition, the music industry is transitioning from where a small number of entities hold tens of thousands of rights, to where tens of thousands of entities hold a small number of rights. This is radically increasing the demand for verified artist data. Born out of think-and-do tank Mycelia, The Creative Passport was designed to address these issues by becoming the go-to digital identity standard for music makers.

Put simply, having one decentralised hub where artists can upload and verify their data, while also connecting all of their existing external IDs in one place, will open up new opportunities and make the whole process of sourcing information and making payments much more controllable and transparent.

That’s a good question. In many ways the industry has not changed over the last 100 years. This is part of the problem, as there is an inherent fear and inertia when parties are faced with the potential impact and uncertainties presented by new technologies. A couple of years ago it became evident that to drive this forward, we would have to take control and come at it from an artists’ perspective rather than waiting for the industry to catch up. Luckily there are other industry figures also recognising the need for something like this so there is now a groundswell of other services pooling their resources to help address some of these challenges.

In order to get paid, Music Makers are identified by the industry with different identifiers, based on their role. The 3 most common standard identifiers are ISNI (used in the music industry and also for other sectors), IPI (for songwriters) and IPN  (for performers, session musicians, producers). If you are a member of a collection society (like PRS, Ascap, Gema, teosto for songwriters, and PPL, Gramex, Sound exchange for performers) you do have these identifiers, and you can have them in your Creative Passport, so you can share them with integrated services linked to your real identity and artist name, to help your identification and any possible disambiguation. There are also other identifiers used that are not standards, generally called “proprietary identifiers” such as the Spotify or Bandcamp artist ID. 

For IPIs and IPNs, you need to join your local collection societies and you’ll be assigned one

For ISNIs, usually it is your label or publisher requesting one on your behalf, but  there are also registration agencies that can assign one. You can find more info on isni.org

Currently we are finalising documentation and it will be available this or next year, 2021/2022. We will inform you when we have it in place! To stay up to date with our development please join our community server on Discord or subscribe to our mailing list. 

No, not at the moment. The long-term plan is for the Creative Passport to become a Self-Sovereign Identity but a lot of research is still required in the field and there are challenges for immediate industry implementation.

Not yet, but it will be in the future.

The CP community is on Discord. If you sign into your CP profile you will see the link to ‘Join the Community’ leading to Discord.

Our verification partner YOTI accepts documents from over 200 countries worldwide (Passports, National IDs and Driving licences) with Latin characters. You can find a full list here.

Yes! We’re working on this. For now we have the map which allows users to find other musicians from their country and click on their public profiles to find out more about them.

No, those are two separate things. YOTI verifies government Identity, which ensures that a) there is a real person behind every Creative Passport and b) that your real name and DOB comes from your documents to help Creative Passport users to share this info with integrated services and avoid doing multiple ID verifications. Verification through PPL allows you to retrieve your IPN number (if you are a member), so you don’t have to copy and paste it yourself from royalty statements. Along the way, we will add more ways to verify your ID and the possibility to add more industry identifiers. That way you can access all your professional accounts in one place – Your Creative Passport.