Create Catalogue via DDEX Deliveries ✪

What Is DDEX?

As per DDEX.net - DDEX is a standards setting organisation focused on the creation of digital value chain standards to make the exchange of data and information across the music industry more efficient.

In other words, DDEX is a format used by all 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 the metadata to your Curve client.

What Will the DDEX Delivery Do?

A DDEX delivery will 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.

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?

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 on Curve and can not be assigned to two or more different Releases.

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.