DDEX

Purpose

Labels, distributors, streaming services, collecting societies and publishers all exchange the same kinds of information — what a release contains, who made it, where it may be sold, and how much it was used. DDEX standardizes those messages so each company implements one format rather than a different one for every partner.^[1]

Principal standards

• ERN — Electronic Release Notification. Describes a release, its tracks with their ISRCs, contributors, artwork, territories, deal terms and dates, and delivers it to a store.
• DSR — Digital Sales Reporting. The format in which services report usage and revenue back up the chain, the raw material of every royalty statement.
• RIN — Recording Information Notification. Captures studio-session data — who played, sang, produced and engineered — at the point of creation.
• MEAD — Media Enrichment and Description. Carries descriptive data such as moods, lyrics and focus tracks for discovery.

Messages are expressed in XML, and identify parties and works by standard identifiers such as ISRC, ISWC and ISNI.^[1]

In practice

Most artists never see a DDEX message: their distributor produces the ERN from the form they fill in, and receives DSR reports in return. Problems at that step — a missing contributor role, a mistyped ISRC, the wrong release date — propagate to every store the release is sent to.

Questions

References

1. DDEX. “DDEX — Digital Data Exchange.”