MUMBAI: Global player in digital distribution, marketing, and technology solutions for the independent music industry, IODA has launched IODA Open API, the industry's first authoritative metadata and content API. Designed to increase exposure and revenue opportunities for content owners while enabling partners to monetize artist content more effectively, IODA Open API makes authoritative metadata, buy links and media assets available to partners and third party developers. The announcement was made on Tuesday, 15th March, 2011, at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.

Authoritative Metadata:

IODA Open API gives developers direct access to clean, accurate data on demand -- from release notes and track information to release dates, catalog IDs, and album artwork, as well as artist biographies, images and web site links. All metadata and content is provided and approved directly by IODA's rights holders, which ensures accuracy as well as comprehensiveness of the information.

IODA labels can now input and approve their core metadata assets one time and in one system -- the IODA Rights holder Dashboard. They can then make this data available for subsequent publishing across any number of sites or applications. Whether their own label or artist site, a digital retailer site within IODA's network, a marketing partner site like Viinyl or the Hype Machine, or any future sites and applications built with the IODA Open API, the core metadata will always be consistent and accurate.

Buy Links:

IODA Open API exposes direct release purchase links for online retailers such as iTunes and AmazonMP3 enabling developers to monetize label and artist sites more effectively. These buy links provide labels and artists with more opportunities to drive sales, while giving fans the freedom to choose how they want to buy music online. Buy links are added to IODA's systems via direct feeds from retail partners and are updated automatically every time IODA delivers new content to a retail service.

Catalog Discovery and Browsing:

Many of the features available through IODA's Promonet application are now accessible via IODA Open API. Full catalog free text search and structured browsing options such as featured releases, new releases and releases by genre offer developer's powerful methods of navigating IODA's large catalog.

Armine Saidi, founder and CEO of Viinyl, said, "We're elated to be working with IODA's new Open API and its roster of independent clients. With Open API, artists will be able to dynamically pull their media assets, buy links and metadata to effortlessly create their viinyl sites, enhance the music experience for their fans and help monetize content more effectively."

Implementations:

IODA is already using the Open API to build IODA Release Pages, which are publicly available at http://iodalliance.com/catalog.php. Optimized for search indexing, IODA Release Pages provide a landing page for all IODA distributed albums and drive sales to retail partners.

Viinyl, a new company that enables artists and labels to create song-based web sites, is using IODA Open API to include dynamically updated buy links on its individual track sites, such as: http://bigwave.viinyl.com/, http://kites.viinyl.com/, http://startingover.viinyl.com/

The Hype Machine, an aggregator of music blogs and champion of independent music is excited to use the IODA Open API to include the latest independent content from IODA with accurate metadata and retail links.

Gregor Dodson, Director of Product Management at IODA, said, "IODA Open API is exciting for us because it makes it easy for labels and partners to deploy robust applications using our high quality structured metadata. The collection, cleansing and structuring of this data is a significant time investment for us and we want our labels to take full advantage of it. As we continue to build out IODA's digital ecosystem we look forward to extending the API and continuing to engage with innovators in the digital music space to the benefit of the labels and artists that we represent."