MEAD and PIE offer benefit just with a few tags

MEAD and PIE can be successfully implemented and deployed even with just a few of the dozens of tags it provides. This is a fundamental difference between MEAD and PIE on one hand and other DDEX standards such as ERN on the other.

In order to successfully implement ERN a company will need to be able to handle most tags that the standard offers: creating an ERN message without a PartyList, ResourceList, ReleaseList and, for most circumstances, a DealList makes no sense. This then means that a company ingesting such an ERN message will also need to be able to handle these composites as part of their message ingestion process.

This is entirely different with MEAD and PIE: The only thing all MEAD and PIE implementations have to have are the root tag, a MessageHeader and a composite identifying the entity the message provides details for.

Even this list of entities, which in MEAD support communicating data for musical works, resources and releases, does not need to be implemented in full: a company only interested in exchanging information about musical works can safely ignore the ResourceInformationList and ReleaseInformationList composites in their entirety.

MEAD and PIE support more than forty different tags to describe an entity. These range from tags for dance style and artistic style, tempo and beats per minute, instrumentation and vocal register, artistic influence and relationships to creations such as works and/or recordings, to usage information and even information about awards won or charting data.

Some of the active implementations make use of a significantly smaller subset. One implementer reported using just the following five tags:

  1. Focus (to indicate the recordings or works that are specifically promoted at any given point in time);

  1. Mood (to describe the atmosphere of the music);

  1. Activity (to describe the activity that the music is well-suited for);

  1. Theme (to describe the subject-matter of the lyrics); and

  1. Pronunciation (to provide pronunciation aids for artist names and titles).

 

A sixth tag, for the communication of alternative titles was added in a second phase. These six tags already provided commercial benefit to the implementer.

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