The DDEX Industry Standards
While the music industry of the past relied essentially on sales of physical formats such as CDs, DVDs and Vinyl Records, today’s reality is of course digital and music is being offered through “DSPs” (Digital Service Providers).
Revenues are generated either through downloads where a consumer purchases an individual music file from a download service (iTunes, Beatport, Amazon, etc.), through streaming where are consumer can stream songs from streaming-only services who offer subscription-based access (Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer) or from user-generated-content, where a consumer uploads a video containing copyrighted music to a service which in turn reports and pays the copyright holder for the use of the music (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok).
While digital distribution accounts for most revenues, sound recordings are often released on physical formats such as vinyl records. For record labels, music publishers, music licensing companies, technical intermediaries, retailers and DSPs to work together seamlessly across a multitude of very diverse music markets, to allow them to communicate about works, tracks, releases and products (including ownership, release, and sales information) and to achieve accurate accounting and attribution of revenues the music industry realized it needed to adopt standards related to the way it communicated.
Whether it is metadata or digital files such as sound, video and images, information needs to be communicated in a common format and then delivered between companies in a common way so that each party of the ecosystem can understand it.
Therefore, to support the automated exchange of information along the digital music value chain, DDEX (Digital Data Exchange, a not-for-profit, membership organization) standardized the formats in which information is represented in messages and the method by which the messages are exchanged between business partners. These standards are developed and made available for free for industry-wide implementation and are enhanced and updated on a regular basis. DDEX standards help all players in the digital music value chain to communicate information more effectively along that value chain. This leads to efficient business transactions, reduced costs and increased revenues for all parties involved. DDEX is now the de facto standard for the formatting and delivery of metadata relating to the digital music value chain and its standards are implemented right across the globe.
There are currently eight families of DDEX standards that can be implemented to improve efficiency and aid the automated exchange of information along the global digital music value chain. The below map shows how all DDEX’s standards flow between partners and integrate with each other
