Open Music Initiative

The Open Music Initiative is a nonprofit initiative of the Berklee Institute of Creative Entrepreneurship, in partnership with MIT Media Lab, as well as a number of media industry organizations, creators, technologists, entrepreneurs, and policy experts. The aim of the initiative is to create an open protocol for uniform identification of music creators and rights holders in the industry. Companies that work with and have joined the Open Music Initiative include Universal Music, Sony, Warner Music, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Soundcloud, SiriusXM, Sound Exchange, Alibaba, Harry Fox, DDEX, Netflix, Viacom, Intel, and Red Bull Media House.

The initiative is not building a database or a specific product; the outcome of the initiative is expected to be API specifications to enable industry platform interoperability. This is based, in part, on OMI's belief that an open-source foundation is needed to help rights holders to flourish in the industry.

The initiative's API and protocol layers are aimed at industry interoperability through several architectural standards that scale-up to service providers and end-users in the ecosystem. This works to make use of existing standards, such as DDEX, and extend to new use-case scenarios. Open Music Initiative intends to define and develop, with relevant partners and Open Music Members, a new unified metadata layer that allows data to be accessed via authenticated entities in a uniform manner. This is intended to offer a unified view of metadata, independent of where the underlying data is physically located.