Towards an Open and Scalable Music Metadata Layer
This addresses inefficiencies and errors in the music industry's metadata management, though it is incremental as it adapts existing open access paradigms to this domain.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent and proprietary music creation metadata in the supply chain by proposing an open, scalable, and authoritative metadata layer, inspired by open access models in other industries, to make information globally available to all entities.
One of the significant issues in the music supply chain today is the lack of consistent, complete and authoritative information or metadata regarding the creation of a given musical work. In many cases multiple entities in the music supply chain have each created their own version of the metadata for a musical work, often by manually re-entering the same information or through scraping data from other sites. In such cases, the effort to synchronize or to correct the information becomes manually laborious and error-prone. Furthermore, confidential information regarding the legal ownership of the musical work is often commingled in the same metadata, making the entire database proprietary and thus closed. In this paper we explore an alternative model for creation metadata following the open access paradigm found in other industries, such as in book publishing, library systems and in the automotive parts supply chain. The vision is to create a new music metadata layer for creation metadata that is open, scalable and provides an authoritative source of information that is available to all entities in the music supply chain globally.