About us

Dan Simpson leads the Music Operations team at Meta where his team manages the complex music rights ecosystem that powers musical expression on Instagram and Facebook. He started his career at Sony Music in London in various roles in Music Operations before joining SoundCloud in Berlin to set up their Label Operations function.

Over his 20 year career he has seen the compound value that cooperation and standardisation that DDEX fosters can bring to the music industry.

Dan holds a Master’s degree from UCL and BA from The University of Liverpool.

Based in Los Angeles, Kim is SVP Process Innovation & Advanced Operations and oversees the Process Innovation, Advanced Operations, and Metadata Modeling and Standards areas. She focuses on transforming the existing business models and creating new business processes to support the new business models in which UMG is engaging. She designs operational workflows to integrate new business models and complex edge cases in the traditional business models. She also oversees Metadata Modeling & Standards, where she investigates root causes for bad or incomplete data throughout the value chain and oversees the creation of the company’s global metadata standards.

Kim has worked for UMG since 1998, beginning her career within their IT department. She has helped design and develop numerous systems that are critical to the company’s operations, including the digital scheduling system, the asset management and content delivery system, and the company’s global label copy system. She continues to actively work to reimagine the company’s internal tool set and processes to support the ever-changing business.

Nick Williamson is part of the senior leadership team for Apple Music. Having previously been managing director for the online rights agency, Celas, in Europe, and before that the strategic development director at PRS for Music, Nick has extensive experience on the writer and publisher side of the music industry. Since moving over to Apple he has played key roles in the world-wide expansion of the iTunes Store and the cloud locker and re-download service iTunes Match, and the subsequent worldwide launches of Apple Music and Beats1 radio, both of which launched in more than 100 countries at the same time. Nick has served on the Board and Executive Board of DDEX since July 2015 and was its chairman from November 2015 to June 2017.

Kirit was involved in the initial set up of DDEX and has guided the organisation in various capacities including: Chairman of the Board for two terms, Chair Emeritus and Executive Board member since the inception of DDEX in 2005. Kirit is also SVP & CIO of Sony Music where he leads the Global Technology Strategy, Operations and Application Security. He has utilised DDEX standards to help transform the digital supply chain to support sophisticated release strategies and the building of a big data environment processing trillions of transactions from commercial and social digital platforms which enable centralised revenue and royalty processing as well as marketing analytics. These capabilities are used to provide Sony Music’s artists and staff with real-time music consumption perspectives and advanced royalty analytics via the Artist Portal. Some of Sony’s DDEX compliance capabilities have also been made available to the DDEX community as open source.

Kirit brings a global perspective to DDEX having lived and worked extensively in Europe, Asia and Africa. Prior to joining the music industry in 1993, Kirit started his career in the finance industry building the first automated stock trading systems using AI, and in the defence industry to build de-centralised secure open system command control systems. He followed an education in Computer Science with a focus on Cognitive Science.

Paul Cohen Scali is Chief Information and Technology Officer at SACEM. In this role, he is pursuing digital transformation in the service of the company’s objectives and its commitment to generate value for authors, composers and publishers. In particular, he is striving to improve member services and strengthen the ability to process ever-increasing volumes of data. It is through these many projects that SACEM anticipates and responds to digital challenges and those of the music sector.

Paul’s started his career in various positions in the military sector and then in new technologies, notably at Cap Gemini. In 1997, he joined Bouygues Télécom, a French mobile carrier, where he contributed to urbanising the information system and worked on mobile phone services as well as on the commercial information system. In early 2009, he joined PMU, a French gambling company, as CTO to implement digital transformation in a context of opening towards competition of the online gaming market.

Nicholas Lehman is ASCAP’s Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy & Digital Officer, reporting directly to the society’s CEO, Elizabeth Matthews. Lehman oversees Strategy, Business Development, Product Development and Administration Services as ASCAP enhances services to its songwriter, composer and music publisher members as well as to its music licensing partners.

Prior to ASCAP, Nicholas Lehman worked as Chief Strategy Officer for TEGNA, where he was responsible for guiding the media company’s vision, cultivating strategic partnerships, incubating new businesses, and driving innovation initiatives throughout all areas of the company. Lehman also worked as President of Digital for NBCUniversal, where he oversaw and transformed a portfolio of the company’s native digital businesses, including Fandango, and launched a series of new convergent media brands for NBCUniversal. He also held several executive roles at MTV Networks, where he oversaw digital strategy and operations and launched multiple new businesses in the digital music, mobile, gaming, and social media spaces.

Lehman has an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an honors undergraduate degree from Brown University.

Mark Isherwood spent 18 years working for the MCPS-PRS Alliance (now PRS for Music), the UK music rights collecting society and one of the biggest in the world, in senior management positions. He was responsible for the development of strategies and policies for substantial rights negotiations with a range of licensee industries, including all the major UK television and radio broadcasters and the video industry. Mark has undertaken rights acquisition negotiations for a major pan-European broadcaster, led a team of consultants in a project for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) examining the intellectual property rights (IPR) consequences of using Creative Commons licences in the HE and FE sectors and led a multi-party project for the European Commission assessing the value of the public domain in the digital ecosystem. He was the non-voting Chair of the Global Repertoire Database Working Group from 2010. Mark was involved in the early industry discussions on the creation and development of DDEX and has led the secretariat since DDEX’s incorporation in 2006.

Niels Rump has been co-ordinating the technical standards development at DDEX since 2006. As such, he is the main author of most of the DDEX standards. Niels has worked on the communication of digital rights metadata for more than two decades, initially focusing on developing commercial Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems for which several German and international patents bear his name. During his time at Fraunhofer IIS (the “home of MP3”), Niels started working in DRM-related standards bodies including ISO/MPEG, AES, OPIMA, SDMI and others. For his work on MPEG standards he has received “ISO/IEC certificates of appreciation”. Niels holds a Diploma (approximately equivalent to a master’s degree) in computer science from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Steffen Lindek has been involved in the technical development and maintenance of the DDEX standards since 2006. His main task is managing the ontology from which the XML message schemas and the data dictionary are generated. Steffen has worked on metadata-related projects for about two decades, mostly with a focus on rights metadata in the media sector. Recently he was involved in two EU-funded projects where he worked on mapping and transforming metadata. Steffen holds a diploma and a PhD in physics, both awarded by the University of Heidelberg, and spent several years in the microscopy group of a research institute for molecular biology.

Vanessa Bastian has worked within the music industry for almost 20 years both within major record companies, and across academic research and journalism.

After working at EMI and representing its interests on the IFPI Market Research Committee, she then represented Warner Music International on the GRid (Global Release Identifier) and MI3P (Music Industry Integrated Identifier Project) projects before getting involved in DDEX. Vanessa represented Warner’s interest at DDEX Board level and when moving to Universal Music International as Director of Digital Operations, Vanessa continued to do so for both UMGI and UMG US.

In 2010 she stepped in to assist the DDEX Secretariat to run the 14th Plenary Meeting in New York and is now delighted to be permanently part of the Secretariat.

Jenny Pretz has extensive experience designing and implementing business processes, user interfaces and dataflows that result in fuller and more accurate metadata in the music industry. At DDEX, she focuses is on party metadata and identification.

Ngozi Okorie has provided administrative support at DDEX since 2012, although more closely since the beginning of 2018. Her tasks include responding to queries and requests, invoicing, document management and providing project support. Ngozi has worked within the area of office management for several years, prior to DDEX within the market research field.