Music Biz Unveils Updated Music Metadata Style Guide

August 14, 2014 – After taking the lead in the important conversation surrounding music metadata, the Music Business Association (Music Biz) has introduced version 2.0 of its touchstone Music Metadata Style Guide, which provides a set of common naming conventions and data entry standards for companies to use when listing, ingesting, and managing digital music. By following these standards, artists, labels, and digital services can ensure that customers will be able to easily find, stream, share, and buy the tracks or albums they want.

Compiled by Music Biz’s Digital Supply Chain and Operations Work Group, the updated document furthers the mission of the original, adding significant changes to standards for artists, albums, and tracks; providing more robust direction on DDEX standards; and adding Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai to the languages section.

“We have consistently said that the Music Metadata Style Guide is a living document, and with technology moving forward at an incredible pace, it’s important that we continuously update our baseline standards to account for these advances,” said Robby Towns, Director of Digital Strategy and Community for the Music Business Association. “It’s our hope that the industry will look to this document whenever they have a question about how to list a particular artist, album, track, or any other digital audio file. Without consistent, high-quality data, innovation in the digital music space will suffer, and we must help ensure that doesn’t happen.”

The original Music Metadata Style Guide was released during the first Music Industry Metadata Summit at the Music Biz 2013 conference. Version 2.0 is available for free and can be viewed here.