Disclaimer: I only recently learned about DDEX and definitely don’t understand it well yet, so this might not make any sense.
Would it be possible for MB to subscribe to the same DDEX info that the major platforms get, and make the metadata publicly available along with the history of when metadata was added/removed/changed? More importantly, would that help with sorting out the mess of digital releases? E.g., would that data provide a way to unambiguously say what is and isn’t the same release regardless of how platforms present the data? Would it help with release dates going forward for digital releases after the first that change the ℗ or similar relationship?
I tried to get Plex interested in this several years ago. I don’t think the adoption rate among publishers was strong enough at that time for it to be worth the effort. Hopefully that’s changed, and hopefully DDEX’s standards fix some of the issues that have existed forever with ID3.
Thank you for introducing me to DDEX! It’s very interesting.
From a quick look at the DDEX site, it seems that DDEX makes standards for what might go into a data feed about recorded music, but I see no evidence that DDEX runs the feeds themselves. I imagine that the major platforms might talk to the major labels to subscribe to each label’s data feed. Or, there might be a clearinghouse of data feeds, with feeds coming in from labels and going out to platforms, but that I don’t see anything which says DDEX is that clearinghouse.
So, does anyone have information about who runs the feeds, and what are the terms to get access to them?
Interestingly, the DDEX folks do know about MusicBrainz. They use MusicBrainz MBIDs as an example of a “proprietary” identifer to use in a DDEX message.