OpenMusicEcoData
2022-04-17 12:27:30
2022-04-17
Excellence
This is not a final text, I am placing here key sentences from earlier versions. Do not start editing it The aim of the Open MusicEcoData project (working acronym) is to contribute to the economic development, transparency, financial, environmental, social and governance sustainability of the European music ecoystem.
- Please, review this document in html for understanding its structure on horizon.dataobservatory.eu/, where you can find the latest OpenMusicEcoData.docx version, and occassionaly OpenMusicEcoData.pdf and OpenMusicEcoData.tex should you need them.
- On Google Docs, use the OpenMusicEcoData.docx. This document will be overwritten regularly. If you make changes to it, use suggesting mode (change tracking) and save a copy with your initials and time. There is no other easy way to synch with Google Docs.
- Beware to refer to the version as given by 2022-04-17 12:27:34 on the top of the document. Make sure that you refer to the correct Word/html/PDF conversion. The authoritative copy is placed on this github.com/dataobservatory-eu/OpenMusicEcoData (private, invitation only).
In late 2015, the European Commission started a dialogue with representatives from the music sector1 in Europe with the aim to identify key challenges and possible ways to tackle them, including EU support. “Music Moves Europe” has become the framework for these discussions and, more broadly, for EU initiatives and actions to promote the diversity and competitiveness of Europe’s music sector in terms of policy and funding. As part of the 2018 Preparatory Action “Music Moves Europe: Boosting European music diversity and talent,” the EU commissioned the creation of the “The feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory” (European Commission et al. 2020) (in short: EMO Feasibility Study.)
The music industry has fundamentally changed in the past decade in two ways. These changes not only did not contribute to its long-term financial sustainability, but did not make enough effort to promote environmental, social and governance sustainability. First, after decades of leadership from the recorded music industry, live music became the main breadwinner of most artists. As we have seen in xxxxx, xxx-xxxx of the income of music creators was connected to this source of income before the pandemic. The Covid-19 epidemic brought this questionably sustainable market structure to a halt. The recorded music business (with its publishing side, and the recording side that is often further divided by producers’ and performer’s shares) was not able to balance out of this shortfall. The reason for this problem is that after the piracy and technology induced collapse of the recorded industry around 2001, the slowly emerging new business model based on the micropayments of various streams did not replace the lost value from the traditional mechanical licensing (digital downloads and physical sales) and public performance (radio, television, background music) sales. In the biggest European music market, in the United Kingdom, the failure of the streaming model already induced a parliamentary and policy review.
Although the call asks it as a question, or data suggests for a fact that streaming and other royalty sources had not been able to replace the lost live music revenues in any European markets. Live music revenues had been at least 50% of all artists revenues in mature markets, and up to 90% in emerging market, while streaming has accounted for up to 25% in mature markets and only a few percent in emerging markets. Our WP Music Economics has the ambition to create pathways to measure this problem, and offer new valuation methodologies that allow the stakeholders to achieve a healhier income mix. This is all the more important because streaming growth before and during the pandemic had been unequal, and while important music centers of the world had seen a replacement of their pre-internet revenues, most segments of the European recorded industry had never truly participated in this growth.
According to the short summary of the Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory (Feasibility Study) “the representative music organizations have been discussing for a long time the lack of sufficiently comprehensive and high-quality data available to increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the European music sector. The fragmented, scarce, and poorly harmonised nature of the data collection landscape in the field of music has led to calls from within the sector supporting the creation of a European Music Observatory that can act as a centralised music data and an intelligence hub at European level.”
In streaming, music industry organizations and companies only report revenues (total streaming revenue for Sweden, or in some cases, average monthly revenue for a country), which, as we have shown in the report to the UK Intellectual Property Office, obscures the changes of streaming price movements, streaming quantities, exchange rate changes and currency translation weights, and monthly accruals. If an Italian label with an emerging artist receives 15% more euros in June than in May, currently, there is no way to know if a) there artist was doing better b) it was played in markets where the per stream rate is higher c) it received accrued income from some export markets that had been growing since February d) the artists was played in Japan and the euro rate changed favorable to the label.
Even if we do not have the institutional and legal strenght of an official statistical agency, and cannot rely on mandatory surveying or certain more institutionalized quality control measures, we want to turn balance them out with our strength: relying on the quality control of the scientific community and the open-source software/algorithm development community, and the flexibility of working with voluntary and well-targetted data collection in select countries and segments. To do this, we rely on the best methodologies developed first in the United States,
Behind the profound changes of the music industry lies its ability to absorb technological and business innovation, and to apply to challenges posed by mass piracy, or the Covid-19 pandemic with new business models. New technological innovations like micropayments and personalized targetting in streaming, NFT/Blockchain or AI (that is not only present in curating streaming, but increasingly in the programming of festivals or radios) rely on the correct use of information technology. However, without metadata, data is only potential information. In the past years, our Consortium members have been involved in various R&D and scentific projects to understandt the causes of low metadata quality, its consequences, and various open-source and propriatary ways to match centralized metadataystems with a decentralized way of improving them.
Our Proposal is made in the spirit of scientfic reproducibility, interoperability, and transparency. We aim to make allready existing industry-data, such as data held by GESAC and CISAC in their societies, distribution and in-store promotion industry metadata, public data, open, but not readily accessible (reprocessable data) and primary, standardized data collection support key business and policy goals of the music ecosystem in a way that can be reproduced. If we make a valuation in Bulgaria, it should be replicable in Belgium. If meausre the market share of the national repertoire in Slovakia, we want to make sure that it can be done in Lithuania.
Our policy tools will make possible the first, large scale European application of the Open Policy Analysis, which grew out from several initiatives in research transparency, such as the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) group, the Center for Open Science and their TOP Guideline, the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University. Globally, the World Bank promotes this framework (Hoces de la Guardia, Grant, and Miguel 2020a; Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences et al. 2020) and they are fully in line with the Open Science objectives of the European Union (Commission et al. 2020). For further details please refer to ?? Methodology for policy context, pilot studies, and impact pathways
Following the state-of-the-art in reproducible, open policy analysis, we will introduce the “live policy document” developed by Reprex in cooperation with IVIR (in science), and Artisjus and SOZA (in music industry application.). This will follow the highest level or reproducability of transferability. The valuation report on Bulgarian music will be contained in a clearly documented dynamic document that contains the assumptions, software code to read in the data from the data sources, perform the modelling, create the visualizations, document citations, and place it in the same file with the conclusions. Our “live policy documents” with a press of a button are reading in new information, change model outputs and visualizations, update the bibliography, create an html, PDF, ebook and docx output, and place the results on the Zenodo open science repository with an authoritative copy and DOI. Change the data input from Bulgaria to Belgium, and re-interpret the model results, tables, visualization in the document, you get a scientifically valid valuation for Belgium.
OPA is based on the following principles:
Open output: The analysis should clearly pre-specify the output that will inform policy makers, and identify the preferred set of estimates. Additionally, this principle entails properly communicating the underlying uncertainty and how the results vary with the underlying assumptions. Open analysis: All elements of the analysis should be easily accessible and readable for critical appraisal and improvement. This includes disclosing all methodological procedures and underlying assumptions behind the report. Open materials: All materials (raw data, code, and supporting documents) should be made publicly available to allow a policy report to be reproduced in its entirety with minimal effort
Our Consortium aims to implement Open Policy Analysis Guidelines, which grew out from several initiatives in research transparency, such as the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) group, the Center for Open Science and their TOP Guideline, the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University (BITSS 2019; Hoces de la Guardia, Grant, and Miguel 2020b). The OPA Guidelines give practical guidance on how to improve the transparency, replicability, and as a result, the reusability of the policy-making work with a scientific underpinning. (See WP Open Dissemination - OPA.)
Our research project contributes to all of the expected outcomes of the call. Our ambition is to develop an open science and open data service which complements the existing statistical service of Eurostat. In partnership with key music industry and policy partners, we are going to fill approximately 41 data gaps within the policy context of the Music Moves Europe, as identified by the Feasibility Study for a European Music Observatory, with about 120 high-value indicators. We will develop key performance indicators for music businesses and policy indicators to “better detect the performance of the European music sector and its contribution to economic and social development, as well as to sustainability.”
One of the good examples that the Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory (Feasibility Study) has examined was the former CEEMID project, a data collection and data harmonization project that started in 2014 among three country’s stakeholders, and covered about half of Europe by 2019, when it was recognized as a best practice (Artisjus et al. 2014). This is the project that we had developed into a truly pan-European reproducible, open data and open policy analysis project under the name Digital Music Observatory.
The Feasibility Study is built on a consensus of many European music organizations “that a European Music Observatory should act as a centralised music data and an intelligence hub at European level.” However, the centralization, as a pilot project in Finland, or the CEEMID project in Central Europe has shown, has limits (Osimo et al. 2019). Most music data is proprietary, and the European Music Observatory will never be able to centralize the ownership of data—but it can centralize harmonization and pooling certain data assets.
The Feasibility Study enumerates 45 data gaps where music stakeholder and policymakers are lacking information to develop business and policy actions to increase the competitiveness, value-added and job creation capacity, and diversity of the European music ecosystem. It also mentioned the work CEEMID, a bottom-up initiative originally started by three collective management societies, and eventually joined by more than 60 stakeholders in 12 European countries to fill in some of these gaps with a) voluntary data integration among partners b) open data re-processing c) co-financed data collection. Our proposal wants to put the former CEEMID, currently named Digital Music Observatory, a more solid scientific and methodological foundation, to make it more user-friendly, and to exploit state-of-art statistical, data science and computer science methods to provide more comprehensive, timely, and accurate services for the European music sector.
Our proposal builds on 8 years of work in the service of music industry stakeholders, that has proven it ability to increase royalty collection and distribution, to improve the value added taxation of the sector, to understand working conditions of musicians, to put a euro value on the value gap or the home copying, or to demonstrate the devaluation of music in the streaming services. (Antal 2015b, 2017).
We believe that existing data availability is better than that described in the Feasibility study. As stated in this final report, the 2019 Open Data Directive further extended the availability of re-usable public sector information (PSI) with open science data. In both PSI, as open government data, and in open science data, there is a huge potential to fill in the data gaps without new data collection—the fact that data can be reused instead of being recollected is the main aim of the directive. These open data sources are legally open but are not accessible without further investment, and our Consortium wants to make this investment, and produce about 50% of all the data needs of the future European Music Observatory.
The Digital Music Observatory, which was called CEEMID at the time of the creation of the Feasiblity Study, has 7 years of experience in filling in data gaps with open data. It has created metadata maps to more than 1000 indicators covering almost all the data gaps in the Feasiblity Study. We know where to locate data, and now we have to invest in processing, validating, documenting, and making it available for the European music sector.
Most of the data needs identified by the Feasibility Study are quantitative, numerical data needs, but there are also important socio-legal and regulatory gaps identified. Our Consortium is best placed to fill in most of both kinds of data gaps.
We place special emphasis on two aspects of these perceived data gaps which were highlighted in the call, as well as on the information day related to this call. We would like to place emphasis on non-monetized forms of music use and zero price products, particularly in the form of music piracy, amateur practices, and home copying (which is exempted from copyright licensing), and music uses when the consumer does not pay directly for listening to the radio or watching a music video. Music streaming is of particular interest in our approach because it is becoming the dominant form of recorded music use. While total global recording industry revenues have been growing after a disastrous period between 2000-2012; this growth has been uneven, resulting in market loss and revenue loss for most European artists.
References
See European Commission (2021a) about the policy-making process and objectives.↩︎