Music industry to standardise digital data

In an effort to better track digital music sales, several big-name record companies, digital music services and music rights agencies have founded a consortium called Digital Data Exchange.

The purpose of DDEX (pronounced 'dee-dex') is to establish standards for the meta-data in digital music files, mainly for sales and rights-tracking purposes.

Founding members of the consortium include artists' rights group ASCAP, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI Music, as well as several other music rights societies and agencies from Europe, the UK and the US. Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks, which all provide digital music services, are also charter members.

As it stands now, content providers, publishing houses and digital music services have no standard way to deliver or receive information on the sales of music downloads. The record labels report to publishing houses when they release music files to music services in their own proprietary way. Each music service in turn reports the sales of specific digital music files to the publishing houses and content providers in their own format.

DDEX seeks to establish a standard format and tracking system for the meta-data attached to digital music files. Once the standard is established, identification of rights owners, sales and royalty information will be relayed in the same manner for all legally distributed music.

In addition to streamlining rights reporting and sales, DDEX also seeks to standardise the meta-data consumers use to digitally sort and organise their music.

That would mean that information such as artist name, track labels and other related content would appear in a standard format across devices and music programs.

Apple recently renewed its contracts with EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner to maintain its 79p-per-song pricing on iTunes. Last year at a press conference Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly referred to record labels as "greedy".