DDEX announces new standards to improve exchanges in the digital music value chain

By Emmanuel Legrand

Music data standards organisation DDEX has announced development of new standards that "meet the ever-changing requirements of the digital music value chain" and work with existing DDEX standards "to provide complete data communication flows for the relevant business transactions." 

  The new standards include:

  > The Claim Detail Message Suite (CDM), a sister standard with the Digital Sales Report Message Suite (DSR). It enables the exchange of information between rights owners or licensors of musical works and digital music service providers (DSPs), about claims in those musical works and invoice calculations relating to those claims. CDM and DSR ensure "more transparency, traceability, and auditability."
  CDM also enables DSPs to identify any discrepancies identified in that claim information to the rights owners or licensors. DDEX said both DSR and CDM share the same architecture and structures and use the same allowed value sets, and both contain data elements that ensure claims can be tied directly with particular sales transactions in the DSR.

  > The US Letter of Direction Choreography (LoD), which enables the communication of notifications from music publishers or music licensing agencies about changes to the ownership or administration of rights in musical works to licensees (usually record companies or DSPs). Licensees can use the LoD to seek confirmation of the change from the existing owner or administrator and then make suitable changes to the data contained in their systems.
  The LoD works with other DDEX standards, the Musical Works Right Share Notification Choreography (MWN) and the US Musical Works Licensing Choreography (MWL), to create an end-to-end communication chain relating to the licensing of mechanical rights of musical works in the US.

  > The Bulk Communication of Work and Recording Metadata (BWARM), which provides "a lightweight mechanism for communicating, in bulk, musical work, and recording information." It has been developed based on requirements received from The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) to support its activities. DDEX said that although initially developed for the MLC, it expects the standard to have "other applications where the bulk communication of musical work and recording data needs to take place."

  > The Best Practices for Catalogue Transfer, which provides guidance to record companies, distributors, and DSPs on "how to most efficiently handle the transfer of catalogues of recordings and/or releases from one record company or distributor to another."

  > The Recording Data and Rights Standards (RDR), a set of three standards that are exchanged between different music licensing companies in different territories and/or between music licensing companies and record companies.

  > The Recording Data and Rights Revenue Reporting (RDR-R), which enables the exchange of information about revenues generated from the usage of sound recordings or music videos.

  “Across the last eleven months we’ve issued several key new standards," said Jeff King, Chair of the Board DDEX and COO of Canadian society SOCAN. "During this pandemic, we’ve kept the normal momentum of standards development, if not increased it, and we’re proud of that."