About us

Digital Data Exchange, LLC (DDEX) is a not-for-profit, membership organisation that was formed in 2006, and is focused on the creation of digital music value chain standards. DDEX was established by a consortium of leading media companies, music licensing organisations, rights owners, digital service providers and technical intermediaries. Since then the membership has grown from right across the digital music ecosystem throughout the world. As such, DDEX is the only music industry organisation that has a membership spanning every sector of the industry.

The first members of DDEX realised that the legal digital music industry needed to adopt standards related to the way it communicated information about works, tracks and products (including ownership and sales information). Known as metadata, this information needed to be communicated in a common format and then delivered between companies in a common way so that each party receiving the metadata could understand it.

Therefore, to support the automated exchange of information along the digital music value chain, DDEX standardised the formats in which information is represented in messages and the method by which the messages are exchanged between business partners. These standards are developed and made available for free for industry-wide implementation. You do not need to be a member of DDEX to implement any of its standards.

DDEX standards help all players in the digital music value chain to more effectively communicate information along that value chain. This leads to efficient business transactions, reduced costs and increased revenues for all sectors involved. DDEX is now the de facto standard for the formatting and delivery of metadata relating to the digital music value chain and its standards are implemented right across the globe.

Governments and policy makers look towards the development of standards and their deployment as a means of expanding all digital markets through much higher levels of automation of all the processes required along each value chain. DDEX is therefore keeping in close contact with these broader developments to ensure that its work remains interoperable with these potential standards, so that, where relevant, they can be adopted with confidence as being compatible right across the DDEX community.