Standards
There are currently ten families of DDEX standards that can be implemented to improve efficiency and aid the automated exchange of data along the global digital music value chain. The below map shows how all of DDEX’s standards flow between business partners and integrate with each other. Hover your cursor on the bold black circles and then click on the pop up which will take you to a description of each standard.
You do not have to be a member of DDEX to implement the standards. Anyone can implement the DDEX standards after they acquire a free DDEX Implementation Licence, which is available here.
To determine which DDEX standards in the above diagram are relevant to your business, you should read the explanations of each of the standards which can be reached through the links in the diagram. The standards themselves can be downloaded from the knowledge base. The knowledge base also contains more detailed information about the standards and advise about how to approach the implementation of each standard. More general advice about the implementation of DDEX standards is also available on the knowledge base.
Any employee of a DDEX Charter or Full Member can participate in the Working Groups which develop, maintain, and update the DDEX standards, and assist with their implementation. More information on these Working Groups can be found here. There are in all four levels of membership within DDEX, for everyone from individuals to multi-national companies. All the information about membership is available here.
A slide presentation overview about the DDEX standards is available here.
Artificial Intelligence Working Group
For all participants in the music industry value chain Artificial Intelligence (AI), like most technologies, offers great potential, but also presents serious challenges.
DDEX has, through the AI Working Group and in conjunction with some long-standing Working Groups, been working to determine where standardisation would be beneficial in the AI world. This has resulted in an update to ERN to enable a record company or distributor to signal to a DSP at, for now, a very simple level, the amount of AI that has been involved in the creation of a particular sound recording or music video. ERN has been further updated to enable the communication of whether or not a sound recording or music video can be used in training AI technology. Discussions continue on how these approaches may be expanded to or added to in order to ensure data about the involvement of AI in a sound recording or music video can be communicated up the supply chain and ultimately to consumers.
In addition, DDEX has commenced a body of work looking at a variety of real-world use cases to identify the core terms needed for that particular use case and where necessary create and define any new terms that do not already exist within any of the existing DDEX standards. This work will also start to define the choreography that may be required to determine the order in which messages supporting these transactions should occur.
Music Recognition Technology Working Group
The MRT Working Group is close to completing the Entity Cluster Message Suite (ECM) standard. The ECM standard is composed of multiple parts, with ECM-C being Part 1 of the Entity Cluster Message Suite (ECM) standard. The two other parts of the ECM standard are the Musical Work Clusters (Part 2) and the Duplicate ISRC Clusters (Part 3).
The Musical Work Clusters defines the message structure and protocols related to communicating data about Musical Work Clusters. It establishes the messaging framework that enables two parties to exchange structured and interoperable data pertaining to sound recordings and music videos that reference the same underlying musical work. Clustering, in this context, refers to the systematic grouping of entities based on deterministic or probabilistic matching criteria. This approach has become instrumental in streamlining workflows within the music industry’s supply chain, particularly in aligning audio assets with their corresponding metadata representations.
The Duplicate ISRC Clusters message provides a mechanism to communicate to business partners, and, in time across the music value chain, that multiple ISRCs are, in fact, identifying the same sound recording. The cluster type defined does not therefore cluster different sound recordings, instead, it clusters multiple identifiers for a single underlying sound recording.
Party Identification and Description Working Group
The PID Working Group is currently documenting the requirements for the identification and description of parties in all DDEX standards with a view to the approach being common across all DDEX standards. This will enable efficient and consistent collation, communication and use of such metadata across the music industry value chain. In this context the PID WG will work with all other Working Groups to develop technical solutions and/or operational processes to meet these requirements.
DDEX through the PID Working Group is engaged with the International Standard Name Identifier International Agency, to further the music industry’s requirements for the operation of the ISNI standard and to assist ISNI-IA in encouraging music industry players to conform to the standard’s terms and operational requirements.