DDEX Toronto summit to tackle song-recording data gap
The song and the recording are still not properly joined up.
That is the view of Mark Isherwood, head of the Secretariat at DDEX, the not-for-profit organisation that sets the formats music companies use to exchange data, from details of new releases to sales reports. In an interview with Music Business Worldwide ahead of the group’s autumn summit, he said the single biggest unsolved problem in music data is the lack of authoritative links between musical works and sound recordings that are available to everyone.
It sounds technical. It affects pay. A work is the song as written, identified by an ISWC, the code for a composition. A recording is a specific recorded version, identified by an ISRC, the code for a sound recording. Without a reliable link between the two, streaming services, publishers and labels struggle to match usage to the right writers.
DDEX has more than 150 members, including Spotify, Apple, Amazon and all three major music companies, Universal, Sony and Warner. The organisation will host its MusicTech 20/20 Summit in Toronto on November 19, presented by Meta. The event falls in DDEX’s 20th anniversary year.
The summit is a full-day conference at the University of Toronto Conference Centre, according to DDEX. Full-price tickets cost $770 USD. DDEX has named digital entertainment executive Phil Wiser as keynote speaker.
Isherwood has headed the Secretariat since DDEX was formed in 2006. He has more than 40 years of professional involvement in music rights and data.
One tool for the linking problem already exists. DDEX has a standard called BWARM for sending data on large numbers of songs in bulk, including links to the recordings that use them. In plain terms, it lets publishers send big catalogues in one structured batch rather than track by track.
The summit will include a panel on data identifiers featuring Chris Horton, executive vice-president of strategic technology at Universal Music Group, and Sylvain Piat, director of business and technology at CISAC. CISAC is the organisation behind the ISWC system, the global numbering system for musical works.
Supporters listed for the summit include SCPP, Beatdapp, RIAA, ASCAP, BMI, Kobalt Music, SOCAN, SoundExchange and MétaMusique. The event is also supported by Music Infrastructure Company and The Recording Academy.
What makes this stand out is how ordinary the problem sounds. For listeners, this means the money trail behind a play can still break. Fixing the link would not change what fans hear, but it would help the right songwriters get credited and paid faster.
