Sales and Usage Reporting

The DDEX standard that communicates information about sales, usage or revenue generated on a digital music retailer service, to the relevant rights owners is the Digital Sales Report Message Suite Standard (DSR) which is known as the Sales and Usage Reporting standard. The DSR standard, which is in a flat-file format is used to enable the reporting of information regarding the level of sales, usage and/or revenue generated from the distribution of music or videos along with information about that music, in order that rights owners can make onward royalty payments as appropriate.

The text of the Sales and Usage Reporting standards with detailed explanations and advise about how to go about an implementation is available on the Knowledge Base.

The DSR flat-file standard was first published in 2016 and was designed to replace the previous DSR XML format standard, which a large number of companies had been using for several years. The reason for creating the DSR flat-file standard is that the XML format ultimately proved to be unable to meet the requirements for a format that has to be able to be easily adapted to address the technical challenges of the ever-changing digital music industry.

The DSR flat-file standard has several parts to it. Some of these parts describe elements of the standard that are common to all implementations of the DSR flat-file standard, but others describe the way in which messages are formatted to convey information in specific business circumstances. These are known as DSR profiles, so very often, only one profile in the standard actually has to be implemented.

The sender of a DSR flat-file standard message will usually be a digital music retailer, such as Apple. The receiver of a DSR flat-file standard message will usually be an owner or administrator of rights in musical works, such as SUISA. DDEX has not defined a standard that can be used in respect of other types of rights owners. However, there are companies, who may send or receive DSR flat-file standard messages, who are neither digital music retailers or musical work rights owners or administrators but send or receive the messages on behalf of such organisations. There are still business partners that exchange the XML formatted version of the DSR standard, because in some circumstances it is perfectly adequate for its purpose and there is no benefit in changing. However, the DSR flat-file standard is the generally preferred approach for new implementations.