Communicating genres in ERN and which in MEAD

Genres are important data for a DSP to use to successfully market certain releases on its service.

Sources of genre data include the record company that released the release as well as distributors and third party metadata providers. As a consequence, both the ERN and MEAD standards support the communication of genres.

To avoid confusion regarding which standard should be used and when, to communicate genre data the following rules have been agreed by DDEX:

  1. The NewReleaseMessage in the ERN standard should be used to communicate "marketing genres", that is, the genre a record company or distributor considers to be the most appropriate genre to be used to market the release;

  2. All other genres, whether provided by the record company, distributor or any third-party metadata provider, should be communicated in MEAD; and

  3. The NewReleaseMessage in the ERN standard should only be used for genres other than the one considered by the record company or distributor to be the most appropriate genre to be used to market the release, if the sender and the recipient of the message have not yet implemented MEAD.

Both standards, ERN and MEAD, can be used to communicate defined genres in accordance with DDEX’s allowed value list as well as free-form strings.

DDEX expects that the tag for communicating genres in ERN will be renamed to MarketingGenre when ERN 4.4 is published although at this stage there is no timetable for release of this version.

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