Create Catalogue via DDEX ERN Deliveries ✪

What Is ERN?

ERN is a format designed by DDEX which is used by distributors and delivery platforms in the music industry to efficiently deliver sound recordings and their metadata to the DSPs (such as Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, ...). Similar to how your catalogue is delivered to these DSPs, you can also deliver this metadata to your Curve client, to automatically create your Tracks and Releases.

What Will the DDEX ERN Delivery Do?

Delivery platforms can send an ERN file which holds catalogue metadata to Curve. Curve will then read this file and automatically create all of your Tracks and Releases in your Curve catalogue and populate the headline metadata. You will, however, still need to independently attach your Contracts to the Tracks & Releases.

Curve checks for new ERN deliveries every 30 minutes, so please allow up to 30 minutes for newly delivered releases to appear in your client.

Delivering catalogue to Curve via DDEX is available to Curve Pro clients only as part of the FTP Ingestion add-on ✪

When you re-deliver a release or track that already exists in your catalogue, then Curve will map this data to the matching release based on the Barcode and then matching track based on the ISRC. It will overwrite the headline metadata if any changes were made (such as title or artist). But a re-delivery will never remove any non-metadata associated with an existing Track or Release such as attached Contracts, Mechanical licenses etc - these would remain as they were.

How Can I Set Up a DDEX Integration?

This functionality is only available to labels & distributors that work directly with a delivery platform (eg AudioSalad, Fuga, CI, …).

If you are interested in delivering your catalogue to Curve via DDEX, we will need to set up an integration between your delivery platform and your Curve client for you. For more information on how to set up an integration like this, please reach out to our support team at [email protected] and they will be able to complete such an integration for you.

Integration Options

The Default Distribution Channel will be assigned as a default Channel to all Releases that are delivered into Curve. Most commonly you may want to set this default to Digital.

The "when an ISRC already exists in Curve, do not update the Label value" option prevents the Label value of a Track from being updated when a Track with the same ISRC is re-delivered to Curve via DDEX. This is useful if you want to lock the Label value to the one assigned when the Track was first delivered to Curve. A common example is when a Track is later re-released on a compilation under a different label, but you want the original Label value in Curve to remain unchanged. If this option is disabled, the Label field, like other Track metadata, will be updated based on the metadata in the most recent delivery for that ISRC.

The option Match Contracts On Import will enable Curve to automatically assign Contracts to the delivered catalogue, either through the Labels tool or through the Curve Contract ID that can be delivered as part of DDEX (under condition that the delivery platform has this option and that the Curve Contract ID is provided in the delivery).

Set Default Release ID On Import will automatically set the first Release as part of which a Track is delivered as this respective Track’s default release.

Ingest Foreign IDs From Delivery will store the track/release’s id on the delivery platform as the Foreign ID within Curve.

Set Cat No From Barcode on Import will store the barcode in both the Cat No and Barcode field in a release. The Cat No will instead be stored in the Foreign ID field. This is generally recommended for Distributors on Curve, since they may work with multiple labels that may well coincidentally work with the same Catalogue Numbers which would cause issues as Cat Nos are required to be unique per Release per Channel (they can not be assigned to two or more different Releases)

Digital and Physical releases may share the same catalogue number, as this reflects common industry practice. However, uniqueness is enforced on the combination of Catalogue Number + Channel.

If one release is delivered with Channel left blank and another with Channel set (e.g., Digital ), Curve will treat them as different releases and create separate entries. For this reason, Channel usage must be consistent:

If you do not use Channels, leave them blank in both the release and DDEX settings.
If you use a Channel (e.g., Digital ), ensure it is applied consistently and reflected in DDEX settings.

DDEX No Batches accommodates a batch-less delivery format, which does not include a batch_complete file nor batch folder. Please only enable this option if you have been notified to do so.