MUMBAI: digitalmusic.org, the home of music business association NARM’s digital initiatives, is looking to clean up and simplify the listing, ingestion, and management of music at digital retailers with its Music Industry Style Guide, released today during the Music Biz 2013 Metadata Summit.

The document outlines a set of metadata guidelines that can be used by musicians, managers, and labels to improve data quality for artist, track, and album information through common naming conventions and data entry standards. This, in turn, will allow digital retailers to create a more efficient ingestion process for songs, albums, music videos, ringtones, and any other product that contains music metadata and make it easier for consumers to find what they are looking for, leading to increased sales.

“Metadata is an often overlooked but critically important element of digital music sales, and we created the Music Industry Style Guide to give artists, managers, labels, and online music stores all the info they need to manage it correctly,” said Bill Wilson, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Business Development at NARM/digitalmusic.org. “In traditional retail, it’s easy to have someone move physical units around a store if they are misfiled. However, with the firehose of information being brought on the business by the huge amount of release information being added every day, digital retailers need uniform metadata to properly organize their music catalogs and make them easily accessible to consumers. By following the guidelines we’ve laid out, those on the artist side can help these retailers ensure that nothing falls through the cracks and, ultimately, make it easier for fans to find their music digitally.”

The Music Industry Style Guide was created by digitalmusic.org’s Digital Supply Chain and Operations Workgroup, co-chaired by Sony DADC’s Chris Read and Neurotic Media’s Shachar Oren, and sourced from members of the workgroup.