Our report highlights some important lessons. First, we show that in the era of global music sales platforms it is impossible to understand the economics of music streaming without international data harmonization and advanced surveying and sampling. Paradoxically, without careful adjustments for accruals, market shares in jurisdictions, and disaggregation of price and volume changes, the British industry cannot analyze its own economics because of its high level of integration to the global music economy. Furthermore, the replacement of former public performances, mechanical licensing, and private copying remunerations (which has been available for British rightsholders in their European markets for decades) with less valuable streaming licenses has left many rightsholders poorer. Making adjustments on the distribution system without modifying the definition of equitable remuneration rights or the pro-rata distribution scheme of streaming platforms opens up many conflicts while solving not enough fundamental problems. Therefore, we suggest participation in international data harmonization and policy coordination to help regain the historical value of music.

Our paper argues that fair competition in music streaming is restricted by the nature of the remuneration arrangements between creators and the streaming platforms, the role of playlists, and the strong negotiating power of the major labels. It concludes that urgent consideration should be given to a user-centric payment system, as well as greater transparency of the factors underpinning playlist creation and of negotiated agreements.

While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.

The topic of the paper is Library Genesis (LG), the biggest piratical scholarly library on the internet, which provides copyright infringing access to more than 2.5 million scientific monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks. The paper uses advanced statistical methods to explain why researchers around the globe use copyright infringing knowledge resources. The analysis is based on a huge usage dataset from LG, as well as data from the World Bank, Eurostat, and Eurobarometer, to identify the role of macroeconomic factors, such as R&D and higher education spending, GDP, researcher density in scholarly copyright infringing activities.

The goal of retroharmonize is to allow the organization of data joins or panels from various data sources, particularly survey microdata files, by retrospective harmonization the value codes, the value labels, and the missing value ranges of the data in a reproducible manner with the help of comprehensive s3 classes.

The paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the administrators of the service. The weblogs contain records of individual book downloads from the period between September 2014 and March 2015. We use the date, the book identifier, and the geo-coordinates of the downloader included in the dataset to reconstruct the global black-market demand for scholarly literature. We then proceed to build a model to explain this traffic with various macroeconomic indicators on the global stage, and with economic, educational, R&D, and other cultural consumption indicators on NUTS-2 level in the European Union.

The goal of eurobarometer is converting Eurobarometer microdata files, as stored by GESIS, into tidy R data frames and help common pre-processing problems.

An open source R package for validating sub-national statistical typologies, re-coding across standard typologies of sub-national statistics, and making valid aggregate level imputation, re-aggregation, re-weighting and projection down to lower hierarchical levels to create meaningful data panels and time series.

The results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.

This study argues that the cultural and welfare benefits of this private copying regime are enormous and important to create a good quality of life in Croatia for all age groups, but especially for young people, and it must be maintained. Furthermore, it is very advantageous for the tech sector, because their products are mainly used with unlicensed music and film copies, given that only a very small portion of the population pays for downloads, or subscribes to services like Spotify, Deezer or Netflix. The first measurement of licensed use of music, audiovisual content, home copying and value transfer to media platforms in Croatia for a practical update of the private copying remuneration in the country.

Slovakia’s first music industry report. Following the three income streams model from creation till audience, we summarized for the the number of works that were created, recorded, staged in Slovakia in a year. We calculated their revenues, their value added, their employment effect and the investments of the recording industry. There is an extensive business development and policy conclusions chapter in the 227-pages report, which follows a similar Hungarian report.

Being visible in the world is always difficult in the Central and Eastern European region. Made in Hungary is the first book in the Popular Music Studies series of Routledge from the region. A description of our first datasets, the motivation of the research and the CEEMID concept is laid out as a closing, quantitative chapter in the book.

Creating better national cultural statistics with Eurobarometer datasets and ESSNet-Culture technical recommendations