DDEX

On today's show, we talk to Mark Isherwood of the D-DEX Secretariat about the work D-DEX has been doing over the last 20 years to help our industry iron out some of its most fundamental problems.

It's all coming up on The Future of What? My guest today is Mark Isherwood, DDEX Secretariat.

Mark, welcome to The Future of What?

Thanks for having me, Portia.

Absolutely.

That's my case, and I will stick with it.

Yes, now DDEX has been around, 2026 is the 20th anniversary of DDEX.

It is, yeah.

Like let's look at interoperability first.

The music industry relies on data standards like DDEX.

What exactly is DDEX for the listener?

Think of DDEX as a universal translator for music data.

It allows different systems, distributors, streaming apps, royalty collection societies to talk to each other without losing information.

So when you are the centralized source of truth for your own metadata, you feed clean, standardized information into this ecosystem.

And, you know, they've done that on various things.

The industry's done things like, you know, different tech solutions, DDEX, I'm sure you're aware of, which is an entire international body that everyone participates in.

Content creators, labels, publishers, DSPs, they all get together on what is the best way for, how do we deliver data? How do we exchange data? It would be really, preferred if we could do that here.

Barring that, you know, Congress is the next place we generally tend to look because, you know, the U.S. is the biggest market.