Music Licensing Companies’ Communication

The DDEX standard that enables music licensing companies to communicate with music licensing companies in other countries, and for communication between record companies, performers or their representatives and music licensing companies is called the Music Licensing Companies Message Suite and Choreography Standard (MLC). Music licensing companies is the collective term applied to collective management organisations that represent rights for sound recordings and/or for performers, such as SoundExchange in the US, PPL in the UK or SCPP in France.

The text of the Music Licensing Companies’ Communication standards with detailed explanations and advise about how to go about an implementation is available on the Knowledge Base.

The following processes are supported by the MLC standard:

• A record company sends information about sound recordings to an MLC
• An MLC shares repertoire information with another MLC usually in a different country
• An MLC exchanges sales and revenue data with another MLC usually in a different country
• An MLC sends revenue information to the owners of the sound recordings, i.e. the record companies and/or performers

The exchange of data between MLCs is necessary to meet the requirements of bilateral agreements between the MLCs that administer the rights of record companies and performers across multiple territories. This includes data about sound recordings, music videos and related sales data used within rights administration.