  The semantic description of music metadata is a key requirement for the
creation of music datasets that can be aligned, integrated, and accessed for
information retrieval and knowledge discovery. It is nonetheless an open
challenge due to the complexity of musical concepts arising from different
genres, styles, and periods -- standing to benefit from a lingua franca to
accommodate various stakeholders (musicologists, librarians, data engineers,
etc.). To initiate this transition, we introduce the Music Meta ontology, a
rich and flexible semantic model to describe music metadata related to artists,
compositions, performances, recordings, and links. We follow eXtreme Design
methodologies and best practices for data engineering, to reflect the
perspectives and the requirements of various stakeholders into the design of
the model, while leveraging ontology design patterns and accounting for
provenance at different levels (claims, links). After presenting the main
features of Music Meta, we provide a first evaluation of the model, alignments
to other schema (Music Ontology, DOREMUS, Wikidata), and support for data
transformation.
