Musical Works Data and Rights Communication

The texts of the Musical Works Data and Rights communication (MWDR) standards with detailed explanations and advise about how to go about an implementation is available on the knowledge base.

The three Musical Works Data and Rights communication standards enable companies to exchange metadata:

  • About claims of ownership of musical works embedded in sound recordings or music videos;
  • Which request and grant licences for using such musical works; and
  • Notifying users of such musical works that the ownership of the works has changed, in order that the new owner is paid the relevant royalties going forward

The MWDR standards’ messages are usually exchanged between digital music service providers (DSP), record companies or distributors and musical work rights owners or administrators (including collective rights organisations and music publishers).

The three standards are called, respectively:

  • Musical Work Right Share Notification Choreography (MWN);
  • Musical Work Licensing Choreography (MWL);
  • Letters of Direction Choreography (LoD).

These three standards deal with essentially the same metadata entities as they are inter-related, sharing common structures, ontology and data dictionary. Therefore, the standards contain many similarities with common components throughout.

A slide presentation overview of the MWDR standards is available here.

You do not have to be a member of DDEX to implement the standards. Anyone can implement any of them once they have taken out a DDEX Implementation Licence. Information about the Licence is available here and the application form is available here.

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