1 Introduction

This document defines Part 1 of the Musical Work Right Share Notification Choreography standard (MWN) and was developed by the member organisations of the Digital Data Exchange, LLC (DDEX). Any organisation wishing to implement this (or any other DDEX Standard) is required to apply for an Implementation Licence. The terms of the licence and an application form can be found here and here.

The Musical Work Right Share Notification Choreography standard fulfils a variety of communication requirements between musical work rights holders and downstream data recipients. These communications include, but are not limited to, the communication of identification, rights and usage data for musical works and their associated parties to facilitate accurate claiming and remuneration for these works in the publishing rights ecosystem. Usage types include offline and online mechanical and performance usages, synchronisation, print and lyrics. This document provides the syntax for the various DDEX messages that can be used to support such business transactions.

Such transactions can communicate data between musical work rights holders and downstream data recipients about:

  • Writer credits;

  • Musical work claiming (a.k.a. registration), including complex multi-territory, multi-dates, multi-rights and multi-usage dimensions;

  • Change and loss of rights with regards to these dimensions;

  • Musical work to sound recording links;

  • Musical work to audio-visual production links;

  • Library music metadata;

  • Notification of conflicts; and

  • Communicating a reconciled right share picture for full transparency.

The messages defined in the various parts of the MWN standard have a number of business applications, including:

  1. Data exchange between musical work rights holders (as defined in Clause 4) and collective management organisations (CMOs, as defined in Clause 4) with respect to:

    1. The communication of rights, sound recordings, Exploitations and usages relating to a musical work by the musical work rights holder to a CMO to enable the CMO to manage any mandated rights on behalf of the rights holder;

    2. The updating of musical work and/or right share data from a rights holder to a CMO or the other way round;

    3. The specification of links between musical works and the sound recordings and/or Exploitations upon which the musical works appear (for example, an audio-visual production);

    4. The notification of right share conflicts relating to a musical work from a CMO to rights holders; and

    5. The revocation of rights shares in a musical work previously communicated by a rights holder to a CMO.

  2. Data exchange between musical work rights holders and record companies, digital service providers (DSPs) or other organisations that are licensees, as well as third party data aggregators, with respect to:

    1. Musical work and/or right share data as part of the over-arching choreography provided by the various parts of the MWN standard and the suites of messages in the Musical Work Licensing Choreography standard and the Letters of Direction Choreography standard;

    2. Holders of rights in a musical work providing an accurate picture of the control of a musical work to DSPs who offer “user-generated content” services as often musical works are an essential part of content that is to be exploited and monetised on such services. This is particularly important for territories where licensing of such musical works might be de-centralised or on a work share-by-work share basis;

    3. Providing data about the sound recording(s) and/or Exploitation(s) that embody such musical works;

    4. Providing data to DSPs and other licensees about lyrics of musical works, print rights or circumstances where such licensees want to augment the writer data they hold in order to improve the consumer experience;

    5. Supplying such data to intermediaries who are carrying out administration relating to musical works on a licensee’s behalf; and

    6. Communicating musical work and/or right share data to business partners that aggregate data for various business purposes, such as music recognition technology or metadata aggregation.

This Part 1 of the Musical Work Right Share Notification Choreography standard should be read together with Part 2, Profiles of the Musical Work Right Share Notification Choreography standard, which provides specific constraints relating to some of the above business applications.

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