Introduction
DDEX’s Standard for Release Deliveries (ERN) enables record companies to send musical products to DSPs who are thereby enabled to make them available to consumers (notwithstanding any obligations to other rights holders).
ERN is designed to communicate “core information” about such products (in the form of releases, resources and deals) as part of the supply chain between labels and distributors, and DSPs. However, DSPs require more metadata to be successful in marketing that music.
DDEX has recently published a standard for the communication of this type of metadata which would not normally form a part of the data communicated along the supply chain. This is MEAD – the DDEX standard for the communication of Media Enrichment and Description information[1]. As of today, MEAD supports more than 30 different mechanisms for the description of parties, releases, resources such as sound recordings, and works in ways that are different from the data exchanged using ERNs.
A few examples of such information includes:
- Information about “focus tracks”, which is crucial for voice-activated services (i.e. which sound recording or video is to be played when a consumer asks for, for example, “the latest George-Ezra track” – which may well differ from Ezra’s most recently released song because of advertisement campaigns or other events);
- Journalistic material such as reviews about a musical work, a recording, an album or a musician;
- Lyrics of musical works or recordings;
- Information about artist nicknames, whether “official” or not;
- Information about historic chart positions of and/or awards won by an artist, a work, a recording or a release;
- Extended information of interest for aficionados of classical music;
- And many more (see also the "What does MEAD support today" section on the right).
This document summarises what MEAD can be used for (and how) and provides some information about the status of the development.
MEAD: From whom to whom?
How is MEAD exchanged?
What does MEAD 1.0 support?
MEAD XSD
[1] MEAD was called CAI (Communication of Auxiliary Information) during the initial phase of developing the standard.