One-Click DDEX Delivery: How Video Reaches VEVO and Audio Reaches PDL

A lot of what's called "distribution automation" in music software is really just a faster upload form — the file still needs to be manually pushed to each platform afterward. The delivery pipeline behind this dashboard is built differently: for both video and audio, the actual transfer to the destination platform is a single action, not a manual follow-up step.

What DDEX actually is

DDEX (Digital Data Exchange) is the music industry's standard format for describing a release — metadata, resources, deal terms — as structured XML that a receiving platform can parse automatically. It's the same category of format major distributors use to deliver releases at scale. Building a working DDEX pipeline is a meaningfully more involved engineering task than a plain file upload, which is why a lot of smaller distribution tools skip it entirely.

Video: one click, a full DDEX package, delivered to VEVO

When a video release is ready, a single admin action generates a complete DDEX release message — message header, party information, resource and release metadata, deal terms — and delivers the video file, cover art, and the generated manifest directly to VEVO. There's no separate export step and no manual file handling afterward; the XML generation and delivery happen as one operation.

Audio: one click to PDL

Audio releases follow a separate, purpose-built path to PDL — track and album metadata, audio files, and cover art are submitted directly through PDL's own API, again triggered as a single action rather than a manual multi-step upload. It isn't a DDEX package like the video pipeline; it's a direct integration built specifically for PDL's own submission format.

Revelator, if you need broader reach

For labels that want distribution beyond VEVO and PDL, Revelator can be connected on request. It's not switched on by default for every account, but it's available for catalogs that need the additional reach.

The point of automating this layer isn't novelty — it's removing a manual, error-prone step that scales badly as a catalog grows. One click that reliably produces a correct DDEX package is worth more than a faster way to do the same manual export by hand.