🎓 Metadata Philosophy
Introduction
In the music industry, data comes first.
Before royalties, before rights, before recognition — there’s metadata.
But today, metadata is often:
- scattered across closed silos,
- hard to verify or access,
- redundant, incomplete, or even contradictory.
Allfeat is built on a simple principle:
What everyone relies on should be readable, verifiable, and buildable by everyone.
🌐 Why Metadata Matters
Every musical work contains a complex network of information:
- Who wrote it? Who composed or performed it?
- What’s the official title? Duration? Release date?
- What other works, people, or recordings is it linked to?
This data is the backbone of the entire music ecosystem:
- It powers royalty distribution.
- It enables classification, recommendation, and discovery.
- It drives services for streaming, sync, publishing, and analytics.
- It feeds AI tools, collection societies, and catalog managers.
In short:
➡️ Metadata is the invisible fuel behind all musical value chains.
🧠 Why a Data-Driven Economic System?
If data has value, then it deserves:
- a system for contribution (who added what),
- a system for validation (how quality is ensured),
- a system for incentivization (why people participate).
➡️ That’s exactly where a blockchain makes sense:
- Each piece of data is anchored publicly, with traceable context.
- Contributors stake tokens to signal confidence in the data.
- Validators review and endorse entries — transparently and collectively.
Importantly, Allfeat does not store legal contracts or private rights info.
Instead, it offers a reliable, neutral, and extensible base layer for public, verifiable data.
🔎 Transparency Over Complexity
Allfeat embraces radical transparency:
- No proprietary logic.
- No privileged access for any actor.
- No monopolies on standards.
Every data entry on Allfeat is public, auditable, and collectively maintainable.
This doesn’t solve every legal or business issue.
But it removes massive friction around data access, trust, and structure — which is where much of the industry's pain lives today.
🔗 Connecting Web2 and Web3 Through Real-World IDs
Allfeat doesn’t reinvent music identifiers — it organizes and connects them.
Each data structure (called a MIDDS) carries:
- an Allfeat-native identifier, automatically assigned on-chain,
- a Real World Identifier (RW-ID) from traditional standards (e.g., ISNI, ISRC, ISWC...).
This allows any stakeholder to:
- query data using known IDs,
- verify its presence or relationships in a decentralized graph,
- and migrate Web2 catalogs to Web3 with no loss of meaning.
The RW-ID ensures interoperability between traditional and new ecosystems — and smooth adoption without fragmentation.
👥 A System Designed for Collective Stewardship
Allfeat introduces two key participant roles:
- Providers: users who submit data and stake tokens to back it.
- Trusters: users who review and validate data entries via certification votes.
This model, governed by the Proof of Metadata (PoM) consensus, makes it possible to ensure high-quality, decentralized data —
without relying on a single central authority.
Trust is not assigned.
It’s earned through on-chain actions and economic alignment.
🧱 So, How Is the Data Structured?
To support this system, Allfeat defines a set of custom data formats called:
MIDDS — Music Industry Decentralized Data Structures
These are simple, modular, and linkable formats for representing:
- creative works,
- recordings,
- parties (individuals or organizations),
- and releases.