Such sales/usage reports may be communicated using DDEX's Digital Sales Reporting Message Suite Standard or proprietary formats offering the same or similar functionality.

The format defined in this standard provides sufficient details about the individual and aggregate royalty claims being made by each Licensor so that the Licensee that sent the sales/usage report can be confident in accepting the associated invoice for payment. The communication of the invoice itself is not part of this standard.

The claim Detail Message defined herein enables the Licensor to provide for all identified releases claims and royalty amounts to be paid by the Licensee to the Licensor.

 The Claim Detail Message defined herein enables the Licensee to:

• Check the mapping between a reported Sound Recording or Video, and the underlying Musical Work as made by the Licensor;
• Determine whether the claims on Musical Works made by the Licensor are in any way in conflict with claims made by other Licensors for the same Musical Works (whether by right, by date, by territory or by usage);
• Determine whether, in their view, the claimed and calculated amounts (per right share, per Musical Work and per message as appropriate) are aligned with the royalty rates agreed between each Licensor and each Licensee in the relevant licence agreement; and
• Determine whether, in their view, the total claimed by each Licensor corresponds to the aggregate of the individual royalties claimed (by right share or by Musical Work, as appropriate).

This standard also provides a mechanisms for Licensees who have received such Claim Detail Messages to respond with a Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification should they determine that the Claim Detail Messages contain "discrepancies", i.e. issues that the recipient of the Claim Detail Messages has determined may impact the calculation of the royalties. Such discrepancies include, but are not limited to, arithmetic issues, questions about applied tariffs, disputes about Right Share control but also errors in the formatting of the Claim Detail Message – as soon as these errors have an impact on calculation of the royalties. While the resolution of such discrepancies is out of scope, Licensees are expected to use the Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification to signal such discrepancies to Licensors and subsequently work with those organisations to resolve them.

The Claim Detail Message Suite Standard therefore enables speedy settlement on all claims and invoices received from all Licensors related to a set of DSR (or equivalent) Messages relating to the same period and service and avoid, as much as possible, situations where a payment has to be delayed or reversed (e.g. by reducing future payments) because of contradictory or conflicting claims. 

In several places in this Standard, there are references to bilateral agreements which, in almost all cases, are between a Licensor and a Licensee. Such agreements determine elements of the way this Standard is to be used between two business partners which it is inappropriate to standardise. It should be noted in this context however that, whilst such bilateral agreements will determine such issues, it may not be the Licensor or the Licensee that are actually exchanging the messages. Rather one or both appoint a Message Sender or Message Recipient to do this on their behalf. However, because the bilaterla agreements are in place, most references to the roles undertaken in the exchanging of any of the messages in the Claim Detail Message Suite Standard are to Licensor and Licensee.

Block

A group of Records in a Message created in accordance with a flat-file standard that communicate information that belongs intrinsically together. All Records in a Block carry the same Block Identifier and all Records with the same Record Identifier belong to the same Block. The identifier of a Block shall be unique within a Sales Report Message created in accordance with this standard.

All Records of a Block are contiguously provided within a Message.

In the CDM Standard Blocks comprise the description of a claims and/or invoice details, plus any auxiliary information (if provided).

Cell

An individual data element in a Record. Cells are separated by Delimiters.

Contractually Mandatory

An entity in a DDEX Message that has the technical cardinality of 0-1 or 0-n but that is mandatory when a DDEX message is sent in a specific commercial context.

Contractually Mandatory fields may, however, be mandatory when a DDEX message is sent in a specific commercial context. In such circumstances, a message is deemed conformant only if and when it contains all the “contractually mandatory” fields as agreed by Message Sender and Message Recipient.

Delimiter

A character that delineates, in a flat file, either one Record from another Record or one Cell from another Cell.

Note: there are also Secondary Delimiters used in this standard.

Flat File Sales Report Messages (DSRF)

A Sales Report Message created in accordance with the Digital Sales Reporting Message Suite Standards (Architecture and Profiles). A Flat File Sales Report Message may be split into several individual files.

Head Release

A Release, originally communicated by the owner (or its agent) of a sound recording or audio-visual recording to a Licensee who then distributed that Release to consumers, whose Usage, Revenue or Sales are described in a Sales Report Message created in accordance with this standard.

Head Resource

A Resource whose Usage, Revenue or Sales are described in a Sales Report Message created in accordance with this standard. Head Resources are not communicated as part of a Head Release.

Licensee

A Party that is granted a Licence in respect of rights in one or more Creations, by a Licensor. The Licensee may be a human being or other legal person or corporate entity. The Licensee may or may not be the Message Sender or Message Recipient of a message in a specific information exchange defined by a DDEX Standard.

Licensor

A Party that grants a Licence in respect of rights in one or more Creations to one or more Licensees in accordance with the authorities it has been granted to do so by one or more Rights Controller(s), Rights Administrator(s) (where applicable), Licensing Agent(s) (where applicable) or Rights Holder(s). The Licensor may be a human being or other legal person or corporate entity. The Licensor may or may not also be the Rights Controller, the Rights Administrator, the Licensing Agent or the Rights Holder in the Creation(s) that are the subject of the Licence granting the rights. The Licensor may or may not be the Message Sender or Message Recipient of a message in a specific information exchange defined by a DDEX Standard.

Musical Work

A Work intended to be perceivable as a combination of sounds, with or without accompanying text.

Any words that are intended to be expressed with a MusicalWork (often termed Lyrics) form part of that MusicalWork; not all MusicalWorks have Lyrics.
A MusicalWork may be expressed and fixed to become part of a SoundRecording or a Video Recording, or may be used to create notated music (sheet music, scores, instrumental parts) or sound generation codes (such as MIDI files).
In some cases, the MusicalWork comes into existence simultaneously with its expression. This is common in extemporised forms such as jazz music.

Profile

A subset of a DDEX standard. Profiles define how to use the capabilities of a DDEX standard in a specific commercial context.

Release

A Release is an abstract entity representing a bundle of one or more Resources compiled by an Issuer. The Resources in Releases are normally primarily sound recordings or music audio-visual recordings, but this is not invariably the case. The Release is not itself the item of trade (or “Product”). Products have more extensive attributes than Releases; one Release may be disseminated in many different Products.

Resource

A digital fixation of an expression of an abstract Work (such as a sound recording, a video, an image, software or a passage of text). Resources are individual assets that make up a Release. Typical Resources are sound recordings, video clips and cover art images.

Revenue

The amount of money generated in accordance with the commercial relationship between Licensee and Licensor for the distribution of Releases to consumers.

Rights Controller

A Party that controls rights in one or more Creations in respect of some or all rights for specific territories, time periods, Rights Types, Usage Types and Commercial Model Types (which may be anything up to and including all rights for the world, in perpetuity, for all types of Usage and for all types of Commercial Models). Creations include Musical Works, Sound Recordings and other Resources as well as Releases.

A Rights Controller is in many cases also the Licensor.

A Rights Controller may be a human being or other legal person or corporate entity.

A Rights Controller may or may not also be the Rights Administrator, the Licensing Agent or the Rights Holder.

A Rights Controller may or may not be the Message Sender or Message Recipient of a message in a specific information exchange defined by a DDEX Standard.

Sale

Distribution of a product to end consumers. For the avoidance of doubt, the term “sales” includes all forms of distribution of products, whether revenue was generated, or not and, where revenue is generated, regardless of the business model used to do so.

Sales/Usage Report Message

See Flat File Sales Report Messages (DSRF).

Sales Context

The combination of one or more territories, one or more currencies, one or more use types, one or more commercial model types and/or one or more service descriptions for which a sales/usage report is being created.

The combination of one territory, one currency, one use types, one commercial model types and one service descriptions for which a sales/usage report is being created. It is permissible, subject to both parties agreeing, to communicate multiple Sales Contexts in one sales/usage report.

For the purposes of this standard Sales Contexts include, both the combination of one or more territories, one or more currencies, one or more use types, one or more commercial model types and/or one or more service descriptions for which a sales/usage report has been generated,  and the combination of one or more territories, one or more currencies, one or more use types, one or more commercial model types and/or one or more service descriptions for which sales or usages are anticipated, and for which a claim is to be made. 

Secondary Delimiter

Delimiter used to separate data elements within a single Cell.

Sub-Release

 A Release that is being created from one or more of the primary Resources of a Head Release, typically by the Message Sender.

For the purpose of this standard these Sub-Releases are being created by the Message Sender who is making Releases, and tracks from such Releases, available to consumers. These “unbundled tracks”, that is, all the tracks from a Release each made available separately, are the simplest form of Sub-Releases.

Usage

The identification of the Releases and Resources that actually get exploited by Licensees exercising a range of business and delivery models for the distribution of Releases to consumers, including the amount of use of each Release or Resource.

In this choreography, all Right Share claim information is communicated between a Licensor and a Licensee in response to a DSR (or equivalent) Message sent by the Licensee to the Licensor.

If a DSR (or equivalent) Message contains multiple Sales Contexts, each of the corresponding Claim Detail Messages must have the same or a subset of contexts.

Only if a Claim Detail Message is in response to a DSR (or equivalent) Message, will the Claim Detail Message contain claim and invoice information. In cases where a Claim Detail Message is not based on a DSR (or equivalent) Message, the Claim Detail Message will only contain claim information (see also Clause 5.5).

The Licensor may then follow-up this retraction with a further Claim Detail Message that replaces the erroneous Claim Detail Message, as orignally sent. All three message shall have unique MessageIds.

If a Licensor wishes to retract a corrected Claim Detail Message, it must first retract all Claim Detail Messages previously sent that were corrected by the Claim Detail Message it wishes to retract before retracting that particular Claim Detail Message.

If a Licensor wishes to correct parts of a Claim Detail Message, the process described in Clause 5.4 must be used.

Unless specifically indicating otherwise, Retractions of Claim Detail Messages are considered to be Claim Detail Messages themselves.

Claim Detail Discrepancy Notifications cannot be retracted.

To remove an individual claim from a Claim Detail Message, the Licensor shall set the relevant claim percentages to 0%.

To remove an individual invoice detail item from a Claim Detail Message, the Licensor shall set the relevant revenue figures to 0.

The format used to communicate such corrections follows the rules of the Profile of the corrected Claim Detail Message, albeit with different Record Types. Details are provided in the relevant Profiles.

Unless specifically indicating otherwise, Corrections of Claim Detail Messages are considered to be Claim Detail Messages themselves.

Claim Detail Discrepancy Notifications cannot be corrected.

A pre-usage Claim Detail Message may be sent in direct reply to a DSR (or equivalent) Message without usage information or based on other, typically contractual, triggers. 

This process is a subset of the process depicted in Clause 5.1 and therefore this standard permits a Claim Detail Message to be sent by a Licensor to a Licensee without any financial calculations or invoice information.

6.3.1 Record Delimiter

Each Record is placed into one line terminated by a line feed (Unicode U+000A) or a carriage return and line feed pair (Unicode U+000D 000A).

6.3.2 Primary (Cell) Delimiter

Cells within a Record are separated by tab characters (Unicode U+0009).

6.3.3 Secondary  Delimiter

Should a Cell contain two or more data elements, these data elements shall be separated by a pipe character (Unicode U+007C). This is referred to as a Secondary Delimiter.

All data elements in a multi-value Cell shall be of the same primitive data type.

6.3.4 Namespace Delimiter

Should a Cell contain a data element whose providence needs to be provided, the data element shall be preceded by a string that provides a "namespace" and two colon characters (Unicode U+003A). The double colon is referred to as a Namespace Delimiter.

Examples include specifically, identifiers, where, e.g., a party ID can be communicated as  "ISNI::0000000081266409", indicating that the identifier (0000000081266409) is an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI).

6.3.5  Spaces and Delimiters (I)

Delimiters shall not be surrounded by extra space characters. The same principle applies to the Secondary Delimiter.

Example: The writer pair Lennon/McCartney should be communicated as "Lennon|McCartney" and not as "Lennon | McCartney".

6.3.6 Spaces and Delimiters (II)

If a Message Sender has received data with extra white spaces, they are encouraged to trim any such extra white space characters when compiling a message specified in the Claim Detail Message Suite Standard. They may, however, also use the data with these extra white space characters in such cases. The same principle applies to the Secondary Delimiter.

Example: When the Message Sender received Lennon as “Lennon “ and McCartney as “McCartney “, then the writer pair may be communicated as “Lennon |McCartney “).

To escape a primary Delimiter, the escaping code is the backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A[TAB]B would have to be communicated as A\[TAB]B (with [TAB]representing the tabulator).

To escape a secondary Delimiter, the escaping code is a double backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A|B would have to be communicated as A\\|B.

To communicate a backslash character, three backslash characters need to be communicated. Therefore the string A\B would have to be communicated as A\\\B.

This “escaping mechanism” must be used for all special characters in all Cells, whether those Cells allow multiple values or not. A non-escaped pipe character in a single-value cell is, consequently, an error.

For the avoidance of doubt, escaping a character that should not be escaped, or not escaping a character that should have been escaped, will lead to an invalid Claim Detail Message or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification.

Implementers are reminded that some accounting applications may only be able to handle six, or even four, decimal places.

When a field of type “decimal” is to communicate an integer, the number may be represented with a trailing decimal point, a trailing “.0” or with no trailing characters. For example, the number five can be represented as “5”, “5.” for “5.0”.

When the number 0 (zero) is to be communicated in a Cell for decimal values, this shall be represented as 0 (and not 0.0 or 0.000000).

To override a DDEX-defined value, the DDEX-defined value “UserDefined” shall be used, followed by single space character and a string representing the term to be communicated. This string shall only comprise lower case letters, upper case letters or digits, e.g. UserDefined StreamInOnlineGame.

Such user-defined values will need to be agreed between Licensor and Licensee and users are encouraged to raise these issues with DDEX with a view to having these values added to the list of DDEX-defined allowed values.

Some records, such as the InvoiceDetailRecordId in the detailed Claim Detail Message data Records need to be referenced from other messages such as an invoice message. In that case the combination of MessageSenderId, MessageId (as communicated in the CDMH Record), BlockId and reference are globally unique.

When choosing a reference, users are strongly recommended to limit themselves to letters and digits, i.e. A-Z, a-z and 0-9.

Message Sender and Message Recipient (who may be Licensee and Licensor, or who may have been authorised by Licensee and Licensor) may use the following approach to exchanging (and acknowledging) Claim Detail and Claim Detail Discrepancy Notifications Messages created in accordance with this standard:

1. TheMessage Sender, shall upload the file containing the Claim Detail Message or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification to a mutually-agreed folder on a mutually-agreed SFTP server;
2. Once the message has been uploaded completely, the Message Sender, shall place a zero-byte semaphore into a sub-folder of the folder containing the uploaded message; 
   The sub-folder shall be called file_available/ and the semaphore file shall have the same file name as the Claim Detail Message or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification, albeit with a underscore prefix and a file extension of .ctrl instead of .tsv;
3. The Message Recipient shall download the uploaded message once it has seen the relevant semaphore file;
4. Once the Message Recipient has successfully downloaded the message it shall delete the relevant semaphore file from the SFTP server;
5. The Message Recipient may also delete the uploaded message from the SFTP server at this stage; and
6. Should Message Sender and Message Recipient agree to communicate acknowledgements for Claim Detail Messages or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notifications, these should be placed, by the Message Recipient, into a sub-folder of the folder containing the uploaded Claim Detail Message or Claim Detail Discrepancy Notification called acknowledgements/. The name of the acknowledgement file shall be the name of the acknowledged message, albeit with three changes:

• • The name of the acknowledgement shall be preceded by ACK_ instead of the MessageType indicated below; and
  • The time stamp shall be replaced with a time stamp of the acknowledgement, expressed in the same syntax as the time stamp used in the file name of the uploaded message.

DDEX may define the syntax of the acknowledgement message in a separate Part of this standard at a later time.

All Claim Detail Messages and Claim Detail Discrepancy Notifications files shall be named in accordance with the Clause 6.16.

MessageType_MessageRecipient_MessageSender_ServiceDescription_MessageNotificationPeriod_TerritoryOfUseOrSale_MessageCreatedDateTime.ext

With:

The following constraints apply:

1. None of the file name elements may contain an underscore character.
2. None of the file name elements may contain a space character.
3. When a file name element is to be omitted, the two underscore characters to the left and right follow each other immediately.
4. Other file naming conventions may be agreed on a bilateral basis (specifically for testing).

It is therefore recommended, for each Record Type used in a Message created in accordance with this standard, to include a Record that provide Cell “headings” for that Record once. The first Cell of such Records is populated with the relevant Record Type and shall be preceded by a hash symbol (“#”) in accordance with Clause 6.8.

Note: if such headings are over-used and/or repeated too often, they could unnecessarily inflate the file size.

These Record Types are used in Profile-specific standards which are, in turn, built upon this standard. At the time of writing this Part, the following Profiles have been defined by DDEX as:

1. Profile for Post-usage Reporting of New Claims and/or Invoice Details (Part 3);
2. Profile for Correcting Post-usage Reports of New Claims and/or Invoice Details (Part 3);
3. Profile for Pre-usage Reporting of New Claims (Part 3);
4. Profile for Correcting Pre-usage Reports of New Claims (Part 3);
5. Notification of Record Discrepancies (Part 4); and
6. Notification of Over-Claim Discrepancies (Part 5).

DDEX expects to add further Profile standards over time. They will be published on the DDEX Knowledge Base where a complete list of Profiles of the Claim Detail Message Suite Standard can be found.