With the enormous amount of data being created online by artists of all sizes (e.g. digital music, photos, blog posts, videos, etc.), and by their fans each day (e.g. plays, downloads, likes, faves, sharing, recommending, commenting etc.), it seems there needs to be a way to organize and share this kind of data relative to musicians and bands effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a free, open and portable format for exchanging this kind of artist data, and RSS is not sufficient. Additionally, each music provider, from iLike to PureVolume is expressing artist data a bit differently, making the exchange process cumbersome.

With that said, Band Metrics decided to create the Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF), a free, open and portable XML based format for the purpose of sharing data relative to musicians and bands, and we're announcing it today at the SanFran MusicTech Summit.

We created this format for two reasons. First, measuring artist data is what we do, and we wanted to help other companies, developers and artists collaborate on this effort, as presently, there is no effective and efficient way to exchange artist data. (if you know of a format that already exists, please let us know, as we'd welcome the opportunity to utilize it)  Secondly, we wanted to standardize the way companies, developers and artists exchange data with our soon-to-be-released API.

To provide your feedback, comments and/or suggestions about the MDEF, please go here and tell us what you think.

Btw, the initial schema for the Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF), version 0.1, while operational, is in the very early stages, so we welcome your thoughts on how to improve it.