Music industry officials are meeting this week in Nashville to discuss ways to combat online music piracy.
Some 70 people are attending sessions organized by DDEX, Digital Data Exchange, to develop ways for copyright tracking and enforcement and study standards in the digital supply chain.
Attending are representatives of international digital retailers, digital distributors and aggregators, record companies, music rights societies, publishers and various technical service providers.
The weeklong event is designed to suggest how Nashville industry representatives can make their digital business more efficient, save costs and increase revenues.
"Every industry has standards which are voluntary and free to use and DDEX provides these for the music industry," DDEX chairman Kirit Joshi said. "We also do a lot to encourage implementations so the industry as a whole can reap the benefits of high levels of automation based on those standards."
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, music piracy costs the U.S. economy $12.5 billion annually and is responsible for 70,000 lost jobs.
Just last week, record labels and others announced they have created a program to alert Internet subscribers when their accounts are used to access songs and other content considered unauthorized.
DDEX, a nonprofit group whose top executives are in London and New York City, formed in 2006 to begin developing the standards required to help the expansion of the legal music industry.
It has more than 60 members including record companies, publishers and digital retailers. They develop standards to guide the development of online music supply.
Expected to be represented are Google, Apple, Nokia, Napster, Sony Music, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and others.
The meeting at the Gordon E. Inman Conference Center at Belmont University on Nashville's Music Row is open to anyone who owns, produces or sells music in the digital environment.
Nashville is an international center for music writing and recording, especially country music.
