M+E Daily

The standards organization Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) Oct.10 announced the launch of two new standards for the recording industry: Recording Information Notification (RIN), an XML file that standardizes the metadata describing all aspects of a recording project; and Digital Sales Report (DSR), a flat file format that enables digital service providers to report sales and usage information to rights owners.

Pointing out that 2016 marks its 10th anniversary, DDEX said it now “covers the entire digital music ecosystem, rationalizing and automating the exchange of information needed to license, track, and account for music sales and usage.”

Apple has been a supporter of DDEX since its creation and is “very supportive of the use of standards and having standards,” Nick Williamson, DDEX chairman and head of music publishing operations at Apple, said during a phone news conference Oct. 10. Having such standards adopted and in use is “going to help the industry enormously and it certainly helps us in our job of trying to make sure that creators and record labels get paid correctly,” he said.

DDEX previously introduced standards for sales and usage reporting that were “widely adopted,” all in the XML format, he said. XML has been a “pretty decent format for downloads, but when we moved into streaming,” the volume grew significantly and “we really needed to shift gears and look at a more simplified format to greatly reduce those volumes” and also “make it possible for the much smaller rights holders to” access and use the files easily, he said.

RIN was “designed for the structured collection” of metadata during the creation of a musical work or a sound recording, Maureen Droney, managing director of the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing and a key member of the RIN Working Group, told reporters. RIN includes technical information about the recordings and crediting information about the contributors and their roles, she said. She added: “As a component of the existing DDEX suite of XML-based message standards, RIN is able to integrate into the music industry’s existing infrastructure.”

She went on to explain that, with the shift to digital music delivery, there is now typically only “minimal” information provided when music is distributed, including only the main artist’s name, the song and album titles, and maybe the recording date. “There’s a lot more about the recording that’s crucial to its context both in the creative and in business applications, so RIN was created to address this problem,” she explained.

RIN provides a “studio metadata environment” that “enables content creators to collect notes and records about individual recordings, while also addressing performers and their roles’ information, and it provides the essential information for archiving the recorded material,” she said.

RIN “will facilitate crediting, ensuring that the proper parties are recognized and paid for their contributions, while also providing important technical and creative information that can both enrich the consumer experience and preserve the creative details of the asset itself,”said John Sarappo, director of engineering at data management service company VeVasound and another key member of the RIN Working Group.

Sarappo added: “RIN brings structure to all these parts of the music supply chain by creating standardization so that the systems only need to deal with a single message format and their definitions, and people only have a single system to learn. RIN has been designed to provide benefits to many sectors within the industry by resolving complex issues that affect all aspects of the sales, marketing and distribution chains, while reducing costs and improving efficiency.”

One “major benefit” of RIN is that it “addresses the current problem regarding the collection and transmission of information about the participating of performers, producers, recording engineers and others within the recording process,” he said. After all, he said, the identity of performers — whether featured or non-featured — is required by the collective management organizations that distribute performance royalties, and they often find it hard to obtain such information. He added that, with the digital revenue stream growing, “it is more important than ever to streamline the process of identifying” all the participating performers.

The DSR flat file format, meanwhile, is “structured to enable complex uses of musical works to be reported in a form that allows music publishers and rights societies to allocate the correct value of royalty to each sale or use for distribution onto the rightful people and organizations,” DDEX said in a news release.

DDEX members have worked together for the past two years to “ensure this new standard meets the requirements of everyone in the value chain,” Laurent Lemasson, head of strategic and partnership projects for information technology at the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM) and chairman of the DSR Working Group, said of DSR. “For an author’s rights collective society such as SACEM the data we receive in relation to sales and usage of our members’ musical works is absolutely critical in enabling us to collect and distribute royalties efficiently, accurately and fairly,” he said.

“Several” DDEX member companies have already implemented or are in the process of implementing DSR with their business partners, DDEX said, adding it expects to further develop the standard for reporting sales and usages to record companies and music licensing companies.