Media Enrichment and Description (MEAD)

MEAD provides for the communication by record companies and metadata companies of “rich” metadata about parties, releases, resources such as sound recordings, and musical works. As such, MEAD provides data that significantly supplements the communication of “core” supply chain and rights management data exchanged using ERN.

The standard provides a flexible “menu” approach were only those items that a sender of a MEAD message has access to are actually communicated. So, no sender of a MEAD message is expected to send information about every type of information the structure allows.

The most recent version of the MEAD to be published is MEAD 1.1 and is a Candidate Standard.

The text of the MEAD standard can be found here.

Remember, at least before going live with an implementation, you will need to take out a DDEX Implementation Licence. Information about the Implementation Licence can be found here and the application form is available here.

General explanation of MEAD

This section provides a general explanation of the purpose of MEAD and what sort of data can be communicated using the standard. This section also discusses that MEAD is a modular standard and implementers can gain significant benefits from implementing a (small) subset of the MEAD features.

Detailed implementation guidance and best practice for MEAD

This section provides access to a large range of articles under different subject headings, about all aspects of MEAD. This section of the knowledge base is searchable.

Current data dictionaries for MEAD

Here are links for the data dictionaries for MEAD.

Choreography of MEAD messages

This section provides an explanation of the choreography associated with MEAD.

Past versions of MEAD

Gain access to the most recent past version of MEAD. However, DDEX strongly advises that you implement MEAD 1.1 wherever possible.