The Universal Talent Identifier, a non-profit registration agency for talent identifiers, which operates under ISO 26324, has been approved as a Liaison Organisation of DDEX, Digital Data Exchange. The standards body possesses metadata and messaging formats that carry identity, rights and royalty information across the global music supply chain. HAND is now recognised in DDEX’s Standards Setting Organisation category.
The HAND platform is designed to enhance the visibility, royalty tracking, and revenue attribution for distinguished legal and natural persons. Back in 2015, HAND was established as a trusted identity registry for talent across media, entertainment, sports, culture, and public life.
What started as a niche infrastructure layer for rights management and attribution has increasingly relevant amid the proliferation of AI-generated content, deepfakes, digital replicas and synthetic media.
The liaison will enable DDEX members to address a key challenge in music metadata, how to identify the people, and the personas, behind recordings when AI can generate a voice, complete an unfinished performance or present an artist through a digital replica. DDEX has already moved to address AI disclosure through its Generative-AI Declaration work. HAND addresses a separate question, identity, with a persistent, resolvable identifier for each real person, and for each Licensed Human Likeness (a voice model, a digital double, an avatar) that traces back to the human who authorised it.
HAND IDs are designed to work alongside existing identifiers in the music industry. A HAND record maps to ISNI, IPI, VIAF, MusicBrainz, Wikidata and other authority files rather than replacing them, and adds a resolvable link between a licensed likeness and the actual human person it belongs to.
HAND’s public resolver is live at registry.hand-id.org.
As the entertainment industry grapples with authenticating digital replicas and AI-generated voices, frameworks like HAND’s talent identifier highlight precisely the kind of advanced provenance, biometric tracking, and digital trust solutions that will take center stage at Identity Week America 2026.
