Entity Cluster Message Suite (ECM)
The music value chain depends on the accurate and consistent communication of information about a wide range of entities, each of which is ideally associated with a unique identifier. These identifiers enable the creation of relationships that are fundamental to the management of intellectual property, the exploitation of that intellectual property, and the operational infrastructures that support associated rights and royalty transactions.
These infrastructures are operated and relied upon by a broad range of participants across the music ecosystem, including digital service providers (DSPs), collective management organisations (CMOs and music licencing companies MLCs), record companies, distributors, and music recognition technology (MRT) service providers. Each of these participants maintains systems that depend on consistent identification, grouping, and reconciliation of entity data across organisational and system boundaries.
DDEX defines an Entity Cluster as a well-defined set of entities grouped together for a specific business purpose. A general explanation of the ECM standard can be found here.
In practice, such clustering activities are already widely performed across the music industry to support operational workflows such as database management, identifier matching, roll‑ups, and deduplication. These activities are implemented independently by different organisations, often using proprietary logic, data sources, and business rules that reflect each organisation’s internal requirements.
As a result, multiple valid — and sometimes divergent — cluster views of the same underlying entities may coexist across different parties. These differences may arise legitimately from variations in available data, business purpose, or operational context, and do not necessarily indicate error.
Such systematic grouping of entities or identifiers based on specified disambiguation criteria supports key industry workflows, including metadata reconciliation, rights processing, and the alignment of audio assets with authoritative reference metadata. Where appropriate, the application of Media Recognition Technologies (MRT) may be used to augment metadata-based disambiguation through content-based identification using reference audio files.
The purpose of the ECM is not to prescribe a single authoritative clustering outcome, but to enable the structured communication of cluster views created for clearly defined business purposes.
The Entity Cluster Message Suite (ECM) supports specific business processes that require the communication of creation-based cluster types. To enable these processes, DDEX has defined two distinct Entity Cluster Types:
The clustering of all sound recordings and music videos that reference the same underlying musical work (defined in Part 2 of the ECM standard); and
The clustering of sound recordings that, for business and/or operational reasons, need to be treated as the same recording despite being associated with different ISRCs (defined in Part 3 of the ECM standard).
Both of these are supported by a common Communication Protocol defined in Part 1 of the ECM standard.
The text of each part of the ECM standard is available by following the links below:
Part 1 – Communication protocol
Part 2 – Musical Work Clusters
Part 3 – Duplicate ISRC Clusters
All parts of the ECM standard are provided in JSON. While each Part of the standard addresses a distinct use case, all Parts are designed to work together as a coherent framework and to serve as a blueprint for potential integration into other DDEX standards.