Features and Limitations¶

Key features and limitations of DMP are listed below. DMP works for most publishers world-wide, but not nearly for all.

By reading this section, you may save a lot of your time.

DMP is open-source, you are free to modify it to suit your needs. This may require serious software development skills.

If you need additional features, That Green Thing (available as Software-as-a-Service) is the recommended solution. Notes about differences between it and DMP are in green.

Music metadata management¶

DMP can store detailed metadata for musical works and recordings, data about writers, recording and performing artists, releases (albums), labels and music libraries, as well as CWR exports and acknowledgements.

Total data validation¶

All entered data is validated for CWR and DDEX compatibility on field-, record-, and transaction-level.

The flip side of the coin is that you can not enter incomplete data into DMP and hope to fix it later. The author does not believe in fixing in post.

Single controlled original publisher¶

DMP supports only a single original controlled publisher (single publishing entity), entered through settings.

It will not work for publishers with multiple entities, most notably US publishers affiliated with multiple PROs.

That Green Thing fully supports multiple controlled publishers, administration, global sub-publishing, etc.

No other publishers¶

DMP holds no data about other/uncontrolled publishers. Uncontrolled writers appear as unpublished in CWR files.

That Green Thing holds data about uncontrolled original publishers and administrators.

Co-publishing¶

With DMP, co-publishing deals are possible, with each publisher registering their own shares. In this case, the other publisher appears as unknown in CWR files.

That Green Thing has full support for co-publishing deals.

Manuscript shares¶

DMP uses a single manuscript share model, splits between writers (prior to publishing) are same for performance, mechanical and synchronisation rights.

That Green Thing has share fields for performance, mechanical and sync shares for both writers and original publishers. Manuscript shares are calculated back if required.

Original publishing agreement data¶

Basic original publishing agreement data can be entered, sufficient for registrations in societies that require society-assigned agreement numbers.

Publisher fees¶

Publisher fees are customisable per-writer, or even per-writer-per-work.

No support for composite works¶

Composite musical works, as well as recordings based on multiple musical works (e.g. medleys), are not supported.

Registrations¶

Registrations can be exported as CWR files. Supported versions are: 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, and 3.1.

Acknowledgement files in CWR format can be imported.

CWR preview features syntax highlighting with additional data on mouse-over, for both CWR files generated by DMP and imported acknowledgements.

Defaults when creating CWR files¶

When creating CWR, many fields are left with blank/zero values. When the fields are required in CWR, it uses reasonable defaults, e.g.:

Musical Work Distribution is set to Unclassified,
Recorded indicator is set to Yes or Unknown, depending if recording metadatawas entered, and
Work for Hire, Grand Rights Indicator, Reversionary Indicator, and First Recording Refusal Indicator are set to No.

Royalty management¶

Incoming royalty statements in CSV format can be processed, resulting in CSV statements containing data for distribution between controlled interested parties. Statement processing is extremely fast.

Actual outgoing statements must be created in Excel using pivot tables. For experienced Excel user, this takes about 10 minutes for the first statement and then about 30 seconds per statement for all others. This process can be fully automated by using scripts.

That Green Thing can be configured with templates, so that outgoing statements come in any format you desire.

Data imports and exports¶

Data about works can be imported from CSV files.

Data for selected works can be exported as JSON (complete) or CSV (partial).

That Green Thing can import multiple formats, including EBR and CWR.

Audio files and images¶

If persistent file storage is available, images can be uploaded (photos for writers and artists, logos for labels, cover arts for releases), as well as audio files.

Sharable playlists¶

Playlists can be created and shared, protected only by secret URLs.

REST API¶

Read-only REST API, with basic HTTP authentication, is available. It can be used for:

Complete data export
Metadata exchange
Content exchange