M+E Connections

The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) and Digital Data Exchange (DDEX) are teaming up for the first time as part of an initiative that’s designed to streamline metadata standards, according to the companies.

As part of the new partnership, the standards bodies will “collaborate on new, more efficient methods to optimize universal identification and tracking between” the music and film/TV industries, they said May 6 in an announcement made during the Music Biz 2019 conference in Nashville.

The organizations will “work together to help increase supply chain efficiencies and enable value added services in the film and TV industries by aligning on a variety of universal identification and tracking issues such as cue sheet standards, finding common language to express relationships between visual media and sound recordings, and ensuring that metadata about music in films and TV programs is sufficiently robust for the various business interactions between the two industries,” they said in a news release.

EIDR is the global, non-proprietary source of universal unique identifiers for digital distribution of movies and TV assets, while DDEX is an international standards-setting organization that’s dedicated to improving the exchange of data and information across the music industry.

“Music synchronization is an inseparable part of film and TV production,” Will Kreth, EIDR executive director, said in the announcement. He added: “This partnership will have a truly significant impact on all rights-holders. It may seem trivial to agree on standard IDs and common wording, but you can’t effectively measure or monetize what you can’t easily identify — and the truth is, even small inconsistencies can hold up payments of sync rights. We are excited to work with DDEX to make the whole process more efficient on all sides.”

Pointing to the “massive success” of movie soundtracks including A Star Is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody, as well as “the explosion” of music usage in film and TV, Mark Isherwood, secretariat of DDEX, said: “It simply makes sense for the music and visual industries to collaborate on establishing a common language. The ultimate goal is always to get rights-holders paid fairly in the most efficient way possible. This partnership with EIDR will go a long way toward ensuring exactly that.”

EIDR noted that its distinctive identifiers can be easily placed as metadata within audio-visual objects across a wide variety of content, including film, streaming video on demand (SVOD) and over-the-top (OTT) streaming video services, digital content and TV (shows, seasons and episodes). The accompanying metadata includes titles, primary credits, edit details and technical details, allowing users to “positively and precisely ID content, thus mitigating legacy inefficiencies within cross-platform media workflows, such as time-consuming title matching and identification,” EIDR said.

Kreth and Isherwood were planning to speak May 6 in a panel session called “Making Modern Music Metadata Standards Work” at the Metadata Summit during Music Biz 2019.