Editorial Metadata in Electronic Music Distribution Systems: Between Universalism and Isolationism

We address the problem of metadata management in the context of future Electronic Music Distribution (EMD) systems, and propose a classification of existing musical editorial systems in two categories: the isolationists and the universalists. Universalists propose shared information at the expense of consensuality, while isolationist approaches allow individual parameterization at the expense of the lack of reusability. We propose an architecture and a system for managing editorial metadata that lies in the middle of these two extremes: we organize musical editorial information in such a way that users can benefit from shared metadata when they wish, while also allowing them to create and manage a private version of editorial information. A mechanism allows the synchronizing of both views: the shared and the private.