  One of the significant issues in the music supply chain today is the lack of
consistent, complete and authoritative information or metadata regarding the
creation of a given musical work. In many cases multiple entities in the music
supply chain have each created their own version of the metadata for a musical
work, often by manually re-entering the same information or through scraping
data from other sites. In such cases, the effort to synchronize or to correct
the information becomes manually laborious and error-prone. Furthermore,
confidential information regarding the legal ownership of the musical work is
often commingled in the same metadata, making the entire database proprietary
and thus closed. In this paper we explore an alternative model for creation
metadata following the open access paradigm found in other industries, such as
in book publishing, library systems and in the automotive parts supply chain.
The vision is to create a new music metadata layer for creation metadata that
is open, scalable and provides an authoritative source of information that is
available to all entities in the music supply chain globally.
