BWARM explained

Purpose of BWARM

The Music Modernization Act 2018 has established a blanket mechanical licence for the use of musical works in the United States. The US Copyright Office had appointed a company, the Mechanical Licensing Collective, with the administration of this mechanical licence.

As part of its duties, the Mechanical Licensing Collective needs to share, with eligible parties, the content of its database of works, writers, publishers and recordings.

BWARM has been specifically designed for the communication of this data.

Structure of BWARM feeds

To support this function, BWARM is basically a flat-file “database dump” format to allow a data provider to send work-recording links in bulk to recipients. Each dump comprises of a series of files. Each file contains the data from a database table. The following entity-relationship diagram gives an overview of the data contain in a BWARM feed:

Such communications are effected using SFTP.