Origin and trustworthiness of MEAD and PIE information

MEAD and PIE are standard that allow a DSP (or other company) to collate information about a musical work, sound recording, release or an artist from different sources. The DSP would then want to combine this information into a complete picture about the musical work, sound recording, release or artist for its consumers.

It is crucial for DSPs to assess the trustworthiness of the information received. To aid this, the MEAD and PIE standards allow to communicate, for each metadata composite, a origin – which may well differ from the sender of the MEAD/PIE message – as well as a time stamp to indicate when the metadata item has been created (e.g. when was a biography written) and a flag that indicates whether the data has been verified by the message sender (or whether it just passes the data on).