DDEX, the international standards-setting organization dedicated to improving the exchange of data and information across the music industry, has announced the publishing of their Musical Work Right Share Notification Standard (MWN) Version 1.3. 

 

The Musical Work Right Share Notification Standard (MWN) fulfils a variety of communication requirements between musical work rights holders and downstream data recipients. This includes the communication of identification, rights and usage data for musical works and their associated parties to facilitate accurate claiming and remuneration for these musical works in the publishing rights ecosystem. The choreography for the MWN standard supports a number of use cases. These include the exchange of right share data, requests for augmented and enriched data about musical works, industry standard and proprietary identifiers, and more. The exchange of these data elements will provide significant value to both musical work rights holders and their licensees and other business partners. To communicate these use cases, the MWN standard specifies three message formats which enable the communication of the relevant data for different points in the digital value chain for musical works. 

 

Sony Music Publishing is really pleased that DDEX has announced the publication of version 1.3 of MWN,” said Alex Batterbee, Senior Director Global Administration at Sony Music Publishing. “The MWN working group has put in an incredible amount of work to develop this new version of the MWN standard in a short period of time, whilst ensuring the widest possible functionality possible. The standard enables the communication of really granular data about musical works and implementations of MWN v1.3 will, over time, see a significant reduction in bespoke and proprietary solutions that have had to be put in place in the past.” 

 

Any company implementing the MWN standard can see a number of business benefits including an increase in data quality and reliability; a reduction in the volume of manually rekeyed data being sent between parties; improvements in efficiency stemming from the automation of processes, consolidation of ad-hoc files, increased speed of payouts, and reduction in required resources; improved timeliness from speeding up the overall process for making and communicating right share claims. Finally, the new version of MWN provides the ability to incorporate other processes thus improving existing workflows which provides opportunities to align processes in parallel initiatives or activities. 

 

Paul Cohen Scali. Chief Information and Technology Officer at SACEM says, “SACEM is very proud to have contributed to this major effort alongside DDEX to implement a new format for work declarations. This has been a longstanding challenge for the industry, and we now have a standard that will help address market evolutions and meet the expectations of our publisher partners. Although there is still much to be done to implement this standard, an important first step has been taken. As the market leader, SACEM will be at the forefront of this implementation.”.

 

Any organisation wishing to implement this (or any other DDEX Standard) is required to apply for an Implementation License. The terms of the license and an application form can be found here and here. While a company does not need to become a member to implement any of the DDEX standards, being a member of DDEX provides the opportunity to participate in and influence the development of international standards in the digital value chain. Information about membership of DDEX is available at https://ddex.net/membership/.