DDEX Explained: The Metadata Standard Behind Music Distribution
When you release a song through a distributor, it shows up on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and many other stores without you filling in a single form there. DDEX is what makes that possible: a shared standard distributors and stores use to exchange release data. You never have to handle DDEX yourself. It still helps to understand what happens with it, because every detail from your upload reaches the stores exactly as you entered it, mistakes included.
What DDEX is
DDEX stands for Digital Data Exchange. It is run by an organization of record labels, publishers, collecting societies and digital services that agree on common formats for exchanging music data. Instead of every store asking for its own form, everyone involved reads the same structure.
Technically these are XML files with defined fields for titles, artists, contributors, rights, territories, dates and codes. A distributor translates your input into that structure and delivers it to the stores together with the audio and cover. The glossary has a short entry on DDEX.
ERN: how your release reaches a store
For artists, one part of DDEX matters most: the Electronic Release Notification, or ERN. It is the message that announces a new release. It carries everything a store needs to display and account for your music: release title, track titles and order, artist names and their roles, credits, genre, language, explicit flag, ℗ and © lines, the release date and the countries where the release should appear.
It also carries the codes everything is matched by. The ISRC identifies each individual recording, the UPC the whole release. If something changes later, such as a credit or a store, a new message goes out for the same release. Reporting in the other direction, streams and sales flowing back to the distributor, uses separate DDEX formats.
What DDEX means for you
DDEX makes sure your data arrives everywhere in the same form. It does not check whether that data is right. If you spell your artist name differently once, that spelling reaches every store, and some will create a new artist page for it. If a credit is missing, it is missing everywhere. The standard carries what you enter, nothing more and nothing less.
That is why the most important part of a DDEX release is the care you take when filling it in. Stores also apply their own rules. Every track needs at least one composer and one lyricist, for example, and Apple Music also requires credits for performance and production. Songwriters are listed under their legal names, while producers may use their artist names. Stores check rules like these when the message arrives.
Common mistakes DDEX exposes
Additions in the title field are common: "feat.", "prod. by" or "Official Audio". Guest artists belong in the contributor field, and the store then adds them in the right format. Another frequent one is a cover whose text does not match the title and artist name in the data, or a wrong genre that puts your song in the wrong lists.
A classic is a new ISRC for a recording that has been released before. An ISRC belongs to one recording for good. When you put out a song from an earlier release again, bring the existing ISRC along. Otherwise the stores count the streams separately, as if they were two different songs.
How OGRECORDS™ handles DDEX for you
With OGRECORDS™ you do not fill in any XML. You go through the release wizard: audio, cover, metadata, credits and splits, stores, release date and review. Those details become the DDEX delivery to 38 stores and streaming services in more than 240 territories. We assign ISRC and UPC automatically. You can enter an existing ISRC, and the system strips hyphens on its own.
The release date travels with the delivery too. In the wizard you choose date, time and time zone, with midnight Berlin time as the default. Because stores do not process a delivery instantly, the release date is at least 5 business days away. For pitching and pre-saves, much more lead time pays off.
You also set up royalty splits in the wizard, with as many recipients as you need per track or per release. In the final step you see everything once more before it goes out. The music distribution page explains the rest of the process and the cost: no subscription, no per release fee, a 10% revenue share, and you keep 100% of your masters.
Create your next release with OGRECORDS™ and we deliver it to the stores in the DDEX standard.