Digital Music Observatory | Antal Dániel honlapja

Cooperation with the Slovak Ministry of Culture and Other Slovak Partners

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0100

Reprex signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, the Economic University of Bratislava, SOZA, and Sinus (on behalf of the Open Music Europe consortium) on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results.

From left to right: Ľubomír Burgr, Chariman of the Board (SOZA); Dr James Edwards Open Music Europe program director; Ferdinand Daňo, rector of EUBA; Rado Kutaš, state secretary; Tomaš Mikš, SOZA; Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex. Photo: Dominika Semaňáková.

This cooperation is a very important milestone for our company: our reproducible research products will be used in an official national policy context in an EU member state. Our Slovak Music Industry Report has set a best practice within the Slovak Republic.

Our Smart Policy Documents will be used to create the Live Policy Document on Music Economy, on Diversity and Circulation,on Music and Society, and on Music Innovation in a national policy context. We will contribute with automatically refreshed web resources and high-quality indicators about cultural and creative industries, particularly music. Our work will be used to monitor the implementation of the Cultural and Creative Industries Strategy of the Slovak Republic 2030 Stratégia kultúry a kreatívneho priemyslu Slovenskej republiky 2030 national policy.

Reprex’s Smart Policy Documents technology will be used to monitor the national cultural and creative industry policies of the Slovak Republic. See Central Register of Contracts (in Slovak).

This will be the first high-profile national policy use of our Digital Music Observatory. Over the course of three years, in cooperation with our Slovak partners, we would like to persuade more and more national policymakers and also regional actors (like the city of Trenčín, the cultural capital of Europe in 2026) to use this collaborative open knowledge platform as a prototype of a European Music Observatory.

LineCheck, Milano, IT

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 15:15:00 +0000

Tartalomjegyzék

Green Deal, this time for real

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex will participate in the panel about on Thursday, November the 24th at 3.15pm about environment and sustainability in the music industry and introduce Eviota, our simplified, connected financial and sustainability reporting tool.

At LineCheck X, you can find out more about our projects

You can get a free, total value chain based sustainability report.
Find out how want to measure better with surveys gender diversity across Europe. And try our test surveys in English or Italian.
We will demonstrate how you can eradicate packaging waste from your music events by making the packaging edible.
And you can find out how we are trying to find where energy is going down the sewage, literally, with Thermowatt and the Green Deal Data Observatory.

Beta test our sustainabilitiy reporting tool

We are looking for beta testers for our simplified sustainability report that is made from your trial balance. We sign and NDA about your accounting data if you test with us, and you can test with older data, too. Beta testing is free.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

The European Commission estimates that the cost of connecting sustainability and finanical reporting will cost on average €10,000 for corporations. We want to bring down the voluntary reporting costs for MSMEs below €500 euro to benefit from green loans, green insurance and other green financing.
It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollution, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extended to the management of social sustainability. We are also showcasing harmonized gender inequality data collection with our other project (see below.)

Download our poster presentation.

Digital Music Observatory: survive in the music business without a data engineer

⚙️/ subtitles/ 🇳🇱 🇬🇧 🇧🇦 🇨🇿 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇱🇹 🇫🇷 🇸🇰 🇪🇸 🇹🇷 + Catalan. If you are there, please leave a 👍, too :)

We will introduce Surveyharmonies, a survey recycling and survey harmonization tool. You can participate in our international gender bias survey in January 2023. Our team will also participate in the KeyChange Creative Lab on Friday, 25 November at 11.00.
You can learn about our Listen Local project, which helps local music ecosystems remain visible on global platforms.
We will offer you a cup of tea or coffee in an edible cup.

Harmonizing surveys on gender (in)equaliaty

Our Surveymonkey solution is better when you have many languages, or more complex questions, including watching a diagram, or showing a small video clip. It comes with a small fee. The Google Docs solutions (see or English or Italian demo will be offered for free.)

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you.

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. Read more on our blog.

Reprex

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 15:42:00 +0100

MTPA MeetUP

Antal Dániel, CFA - Reprex

2022. december 12.

reprex.nl/slides/reprex-mtpa-2022/

Navigáció

Teljes képernő: F
Következő: ️> Space |Előző :️<
Start: Home | Vége: End
Áttekintés: Esc| előadói jegyzetek: S
Zoom: Alt + Click 🖱️

Data observatory 3.0

A Reprex közös adat ökoszisztémákat kínál olyanok szervezeteknek, akik nem képesek adat specialistákat foglalkoztatni állandóan:


🌳 Olyan szervezetek, amelyek nem rendelkeznek adat szakértőkkel, és nem képesek hosszú távon adatgyűtjési programokat és adatfeldolgozást végezni.
🪴 Nem képesek adat mérnököket és adattudósokat, statisztikusat foglalkoztatni állandóan. (KKV, NGOk)
🌱 Nincsen állandó IT funkció a cégben (kb 20 million európai kisvállalkozás és civil szervezet)


	Az Európai Unió, a Világbank, az OECD és az ENSz több mint 80 úgynevezett ‘data observatory’ platformot, hogy segítse az érdekelt vállalatokat, kutatókat, NGO-kat, kormányzati szereplőket abban, hogy szisztematikusan gyűjtsenek adatokat és rendszerezzenek, osszanak meg tudást.
	Jelenleg a European Music Observatory prototípusán dolgozunk az Európai Bizottság támogatásával (cc 3-4 million euros.) Később hasonló obszervatóriumokat tervezünk más kreatív szektorokban is.
	Az obszervatóriumaink azért kompetitívek, mert magas minőségű, open source tudományos szoftverekre épülnkek, és kihasználják a Data Governance Act és az Open Data Directive előnyeit, valamint a web 3.0 technikai lehetőségeit.

Hogyan célszerű rendezvényekről gondolkodni?


🌱 Eviota 🖱 click Olyan adatbázisokat építenek-e, amelyek kihasználják az Open Data Directive és a Digital Data Governance (data altruism) előnyeit, és integrálják az adófizetők pénzén már összegyűjtött, vagy a felhasználók által adományozott adatokat?
🧾 Az adatbázisok manuális munka nélkül, számítógépek automatiálzt kommunikációjával szinkronizálhatók-e más adatbázisokkal (Linked Open Data, RDF, web 3.0 vagy szemantikus web)?.
🧾 A strukturáltan gyűjtött adatok (kérdőívek a közönség körében, vagy más szisztematikusan gyűjtött kérdőívek) fogalmi és kérdőív-struktúra szintjén harmonizáltak-e más azonos adatokkal (pl. A közönség kérdőív az országban elérhető más kérdőívekkel? A rendezvény adatai megfelelnek-e a schema.org vagy más szabványosító szervezet rendezvény adatainak?)


🎶 Surveyharmonies 🖱 click is our first experimental product that allows you to recycle surveys from all over Europe.
☑️ You ask questions about gender inequalities in many languages (try it EN IT and you get responses from your audience and more than 30,000 other people in various occupational groups all over Europe.
☿️ Join our pan-European gender inequality survey in January 2023.


♯ Listen Local is a 🖱 click trustworthy, ethical AI-powered system that aims to help great artists in small organizations and small countries using big data.
🎶 Our Listen Local Apps want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Big Data Creates Inequalities

Only the largest corporations, best-endowed universities, and rich governments can afford data collection and processing capacities that are large enough to harness the advantages of AI.

Data problems


	The cost of questionnaire-based market research (survey) is increasing exponentially and offers mediocre results without an enormous question bank and harmonization with other surveys.(See 🖱 blogpost)
	Manual data acquisition is an error-prone and boring task for humans that requires many working hours (often not credited in consultancies, law firms, or research institutes.)
	Wrangling spreadsheet tables or word processor documents by people without data knowledge is the 🖱 data Sisyphus.

Platform products	Value added data applications
The European Union, the World Bank, OECD, and UN have facilitated the creation of more than 80 so-called ‘data observatories’ to help companies, researchers, NGOs, and governments systematically collect data and knowledge.	The different observatories offer different types of knowledge products, such as statistical yearbooks, various apps, and database access.
Most of them use web 1.0 technologies, inefficient knowledge accumulation. Already 20 of them have been discontinued.	We are developing software solutions that exploit our platforms: we harmonize surveys, statistical data, automate research reporting, elements of market monitoring or ESG reporting.
We are currently building one prototype for the European Music Observatory financed by the European Union and music industry players (cc 3-4 million euros.) We would like to take over existing or start new observatories in 2 years at least 5)	Each observatory gives us intimidate customer access to 3-4 large universities, 1-2 large consultancies, and various specialist institutions.

Dutch AI Coalition


💻 Reprex is a member of the Dutch AI Coalition 🖱 click and we help building algorithms that work for all, small and large music organizations, non-profits and commercial ones.
♎ Reprex believes that unequal access to data, data know-how and tools creates inequalities in the benefits in AI.
🚀 Our Listen Local Apps 🖱 click want to make sure that local ecosystems are not colonized by global platforms.

Questions?

🖱 Click the blue links | email | keybase

Reprex: Daniel Antal | Gabija Liaugminaitė | Reprex—big data that works for all

Big Data for All: Building Collaborative Data Observatories

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 17:30:00 +0000

Reprex’s co-founder, Daniel Antal talked in the Eindhoven Innovation Café about these issues. You can watch the recorded version of the the livestream that starts at 5 minutes and 22 seconds:

This is a past event. Check out our forthcoming events or write to Daniel Antal or to antaldaniel. Or send an email.

The event invitation text and links

Big data and AI creates inequalities. It puts historically marginalized people, like ethnic minorities, and womxn, at a disadvantage. Because AI and checking on AI require plenty of data, usually only giant corporations, the wealthiest governments, and university entities can make it work for them. Reprex is a Hague-based, international startup that wants to impact various sustainable development goals by enabling smaller organizations to join their smaller datasets, use open data, create linked available data, and collaboratively make a change.

Reprex is a finalist for the Hague Innovation Award for impact startup (please 🙏, vote for us!). Daniel Antal, one of the co-founders, will talk about their approach to building an international coalition of music organizations to pool data and challenge data monopolies using organizational techniques, a collaboration ethos, and data from the open-source developer world.

Using the example of independent music creators, who often find themselves in a position where it is more expensive to claim their money from global platforms, he will talk about how to reduce inequalities in the world of big data and AI with collaboration on web 3.0. In the Q&A he will take questions on how to apply their know-how, and generally linked open data to other art+tech or creative segments or problems for which everybody is too small, like meeting the Paris Accord greenhouse gas targets bit by bit, small company by small company.

In the Q&A, we can discuss many things

How can Reprex help an individual creator in music, or in fashion and design, or any other area?
What sort of help it can give to researchers, research institutes, specialist consultancies, law firms, and other knowledge-based actors?

What sort of partners is Reprex looking for in Eindhoven?

Check out our projects

Digital Music Observatory and Listen Local
Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory and short call for potential partners.
Green Deal Data Observatory and simple, connected, financial and sustainability reporting for creative enterprises and others

Reprex: the impact startup

Check out our accomplishments since the foundation in 2020

Daniel Antal (Reprex) EHV Innovation Café Breakout

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 16:00:00 +0000

Slide Controls

Next: > or Space | Previous: <

Start: Home | Finish: End

Overview: Esc | Fullscreen: F

Zoom: Alt + Click

20,000,000 SMEs and countless NGOs without data engineers

Further information

Read more: Digital Music Observatory | Listen Local
Longer feasibility study: Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad
Scientific version: Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market

Questions?

Get in Touch: Gabija Liaugminaitė | Daniel Antal

Reprex Open Collaboration NLAIC 2022

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:00:00 +0200

Reprex is looking for new collaborations within the NLAIC

Questions?

Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal - Reprex

Jumping Ahead With the Digital Music Observatory

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0100

Our Digital Music Observatory project spent a year in the JUMP Music Market Accelerator’s program. Over the course of 9 months, co-founder Daniel Antal could meet many stakeholders from almost all European countries, meet other new music technology startups and projects, and got mentoring and other professional help to further develop the project.

The Digital Music Observatory is one of the several initiatives to fill the data gaps of the fragmented European music ecosystems. While most of Europe’s music is available and promoted on data-heavy, AI-driven autonomous platforms like TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, Deezer, music labels, publishers, national export offices are lacking the necessary data solutions to remain competitive.

Daniel is pitching for partnership with Music Tech Europe on Linechech and finding a music city that wants to be the seat of the future European Music Observatory. Photo: Wen Liu.

One of the recurring themes of 2021 was the notion that the music streaming economy is broken. Several JUMP fellows are working on various projects that aim to fix this, and our Digital Music Observatory has both the data and track record to provide evidence and test ideas about possible solutions – change in pricing, better targeting in export and domestic markets, and checking for algorithmic biases. See what we have done in the field this year in the UK IPO-initiated Music Creators’ Earning project; understanding algorithmic recommendation problems with the support of the Slovak Arts Council, and making recommendations about better music metadata and copyright regulation with our research consortium.

The other very interesting theme of the year was the emergence of new, immersive music tech companies. We hope that our Digital Music Observatory can grow into a hub for their data needs, too. How is the world of 2.7 billion gamer and music lovers is forming a new market for Ristband? We would also like to curate data about the healing effects of sound, and work in the future with immersive, functional music providers like Flower of Sound who place music and sound design into a less stressful, more healthy acoustic environment.

We were often criticized for placing too little emphasis on data visualization. Our next priority is to provide clear, beautiful infographs and charts to all of our datasets.

There were many professionals who helped us in the JUMP program. We are particularly thankful for Alessanra di Caro (partnership building), Elodie Crouzet (program coordination), Steve Farris (mentoring), Veronique Friedrich (team building), Thierry Giesler (improving our pitch) and Anna Zò (Music Tech Europe).

Are you a data user? Give us some feedback! Shall we do some further automatic data enhancements with our datasets? Document with different metadata? Link more information for business, policy, or academic use? Please ive us any feedback!

How We Add Value to Public Data With Imputation and Forecasting

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Public data sources are often plagued by missng values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, but rather malformatted information. This approach of ignoring or dropping missing values will not be feasible or robust when you want to make a beautiful visualization, or use data in a business forecasting model, a machine learning (AI) applicaton, or a more complex scientific model. All of the above require complete datasets, and naively discarding missing data points amounts to an excessive waste of information. In this example we are continuing the example a not-so-easy to find public dataset.

In the previous blogpost we explained how we added value by documenting data following the FAIR principle and with the professional curatorial work of placing the data in context, and linking it to other information sources, such as other datasets, books, and publications, regardless of their natural language (i.e., whether these sources are described in English, German, Portugese or Croatian). Photo: Jack Sloop.

Completing missing datapoints requires statistical production information (why might the data be missing?) and data science knowhow (how to impute the missing value.) If you do not have a good statistician or data scientist in your team, you will need high-quality, complete datasets. This is what our automated data observatories provide.

Tartalomjegyzék

Why is data missing?

International organizations offer many statistical products, but usually they are on an ‘as-is’ basis. For example, Eurostat is the world’s premiere statistical agency, but it has no right to overrule whatever data the member states of the European Union, and some other cooperating European countries give to them. And they cannot force these countries to hand over data if they fail to do so. As a result, there will be many data points that are missing, and often data points that have wrong (obsolete) descriptions or geographical dimensions. We will show the geographical aspect of the problem in a separate blogpost; for now, we only focus on missing data.

Some countries have only recently started providing data to the Eurostat umbrella organization, and it is likely that you will find few datapoints for North Macedonia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. Other countries provide data with some delay, and the last one or two years are missing. And there are gaps in some countries’ data, too.

See the authoritative copy of the dataset.

This is a headache if you want to use the data in some machine learning application or in a multiple or panel regression model. You can, of course, discard countries or years where you do not have full data coverage, but this approach usually wastes too much information–if you work with 12 years, and only one data point is available, you would be discarding an entire country’s 11-years’ worth of data. Another option is to estimate the values, or otherwise impute the missing data, when this is possible with reasonable precision. This is where things get tricky, and you will likely need a statistician or a data scientist onboard.

What can we improve?

Consider that the data is only missing from one year for a particular country, 2015. The naive solution would be to omit 2015 or the country at hand from the dataset. This is pretty destructive, because we know a lot about the radio market turnover in this country and in this year! But leaving 2015 blank will not look good on a chart, and will make your machine learning application or your regression model stop.

A statistician or a radio market expert will tell you that you know more-or-less the missing information: the total turnover was certainly not zero in that year. With some statistical or radio domain-specific knowledge you will use the 2014, or 2016 value, or a combination of the two and keep the country and year in the dataset.

Our improved dataset added backcasted (using the best time series model fitting the country’s actually present data), forecasted (again, using the best time series model), and approximated data (using linear approximation.) In a few cases, we add the last or next known value. To give a few quantiative indicators about our work:

Increased number of observations: 65%
Reduced missing values: -48.1%
Increased non-missing subset for regression or AI: +66.67%

If your organization is working with panel (longitudional multiple) regressions or various machine learning applications, then your team knows that not havint the +66.67% gain would be a deal-breaker in the choice of models and punctuality of estimates or KPIs or other quantiative products. And that they would spent about 90% of their data resources on achieving this +66.67% gain in usability.

If you happen to work in an NGO, a business unit or a research institute that does not employ data scientists, then it is likely that you can never achieve this improvement, and you have to give up on a number of quantitative tools or visualizations. If you have a data scientist onboard, that professional can use our work as a starting point.

Can you trust our data?

We believe that you can trust our data better than the original public source. We use statistical expertise to find out why data may be missing. Often, it is present in a wrong location (for example, the name of a region changed.)

If you are reluctant to use estimates, think about discarding known actual data from your forecast or visualization, because one data point is missing. How do you provide more accurate information? By hiding known actual data, because one point is missing, or by using all known data and an estimate?

Our codebooks and our API uses the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange documentation standards to clearly indicate which data is observed, which is missing, which is estimated, and of course, also how it is estimated. This example highlights another important aspect of data trustworthiness. If you have a better idea, you can replace them with a better estimate.

Our indicators come with standardized codebooks that do not only contain the descriptive metadata, but administrative metadata about the history of the indicator values. You will find very important information about the statistical method we used the fill in the data gaps, and even link the reliable, the peer-reviewed scientific, statistical software that made the calculations. For data scientists, we record the plenty of information about the computing environment, too-–this can come handy if your estimates need external authentication, or you suspect a bug.

Avoid the data Sisyphus

If you work in an academic institution, in an NGO or a consultancy, you can never be sure who downloaded the Annual detailed enterprise statistics for services (NACE Rev. 2 H-N and S95) Eurostat folder from Eurostat. Did they modify the dataset? Did they already make corrections with the missing data? What method did they use? To prevent many potential problems, you will likely download it again, and again, and again…

See our The Data Sisyphus blogpost.

We have a better solution. You can always rely on our API to import directly the latest, best data, but if you want to be sure, you can use our regular backups on Zenodo. Zenodo is an open science repository managed by CERN and supported by the European Union. On Zenodo, you can find an authoritative copy of our indicator (and its previous versions) with a digital object identifier, in this case, 10.5281/zenodo.5652118. These datasets will be preserved for decades, and nobody can manipulate them. You cannot accidentally overwrite them, and we have no backdoor access to modify them.

Get the data

How can we do better?

Are you a data user?

Shall we do some further automatic data enhancements with our datasets? Document with different metadata? Link more information for business, policy, or academic use? Please get in touch with us!

Our Music Observatory in the Jump European Music Market Accelerator: Meet the 2021 Fellows and their Tutors

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 15:00:00 +0200

According to the announcement of JUMP, the European Music Market Accelerator, after a careful screening of all applications received, the selection committee composed of all JUMP board members has selected the most promising ideas and projects to be developed together with renowned tutors for this 2021 fellowship.

For nine months, the 20 fellows living in many European countries will develop their innovative projects, while receiving a comprehensive 360° training. In addition to specialised workshops by highly qualified experts, each fellow will receive one-on-one tutoring sessions from the most renowned music professionals coming from all over Europe.

The 20 selected projects cover a great variety of urgent needs faced within the music sector. They will:

help fostering social change with projects focusing on diversity in the industry, more fairness and transparency as well as raising awareness on timely issues.
enhance technological development with projects using blockchain, immersive sound and VR and AR.
build bridges between different key actors of the ecosystem.

Download the entire JUMP press release.

Reprex’s project, the automated Demo Music Observatory will be represented by Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex among other building bridges projects. This project offers a different approach to the planned European Music Observatory based on the principles of open collaboration, which allows contributions from small organizations and even individuals, and which provides higher levels of quality in terms of auditability, timeliness, transparency and general ease of use. Our open collaboration approach allows to power trustworthy, ethical AI systems like our Listen Local that we started out from Slovakia with the support of the Slovak Arts Council.

JUMP fellows building bridges between different key actors of the ecosystem.

Apart from our Demo Music Observatory the build bridges section Groovly with Martin Zenzerovich, From Play To Rec by Jeremy Dunne, Hajde Radio by Thibaut Boudaud, LowDee by Alex Davidson and ONO-HU! by Gina Akers.

Meet all the JUMP 2021 Fellows, including the technology and social change professionals!

Reprex is a start-up company based in the Netherlands and the United States that validated its early products in the Yes!Delft AI+Blockchain Lab in the Hague. In 2021 we joined the Dutch AI Coalition – NL AIC and requested membership in the European AI Alliance. Reprex is committed to applying reproducible in an open collaboration with our business, scientific, policy and civil society partners, and facilitate the use of open data and open-source software. Many fellows in the program are connected to other regions, like North America and Australia – because music is one of the most globalized industries and forms of art in the world! Reprex is a startup based in the Netherlands and the United States, and we are very excited to collaborate with our peers in new European territories, and in Canada and Australia.

Hope to meet you in these great events - maybe not only online!

Further links:

From Play to Rec on Facebook
HAJDE FR/EN

Follow up:

Jumping Ahead With the Digital Music Observatory (2021.11.13.)

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 18:10:00 +0200

The majority of music sales in the world is driven by AI-algorithm powered robots that create personalized playlists, recommendations and help programming radio music streams or festival lineups. It is critically important that an artist’s work is documented, described in a way that the algorithm can work with it.

In our research paper – soon to be published – made for the Listen Local Initiative we found that 15% of Dutch, Estonian, Hungarian, or Slovak artists had no chance to be recommended, and they usually end up on Forgetify, an app that lists never-played songs of Spotify. In another project with rights management organizations, we found that about half of the rightsholders are at risk of not getting all their royalties from the platforms because of poor documentation.

But how come that distributors give streaming platforms songs that are not properly documented? What sort of information is missing for the European repertoire’s visibility? Reprex is exploring this problem in a practical cooperation with SOZA, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society, and in an academic cooperation that involves leading researchers in the field. A manuscript co-authored Martin Senftleben, director of the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, and eminent researchers in copyright law and music economics, Reprex’s co-founder makes the case that Europe must invest public money to resolve this problem, because in the current scenario, the documentation costs of a song exceed the expected income from streaming platforms.

In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition to acquire a leading role in the data economy. At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use. In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong. Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of EU creative and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence training systems, will most probably be lost. The problem has a worldwide dimension. 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. Download the manuscript from SSRN

Our Slovak Demo Music Database project is a best example for this. We started systematically collect publicly available information from Slovak artists (in our write-in process) and ask them to give GDPR-protected further data (in our opt-in process) to create a comprehensive database that can help recommendation engines as well as market-targeting or educational AI apps.

We believe that one of the problems of current AI algorithms that they solely or almost only work with English language documentation, putting other, particularly small language repertoires at risk of being buried below well-documented music mainly arriving from the United States.

We are looking for rightsholders and their organizations, artists, researchers to work with us to find out how we can increase the visibility of European music.

Feasibility Study For The Establishment Of A European Music Observatory & The Demo Observatory

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 07:03:00 +0200

The Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory was published on 13 November. Our private observatory, CEEMID was consulted in the creation of the Feasibility Study, and some of our recommendations found way into the consultant’s document. We created a Demo Music Observatory to provide a practical guidance on the decisions facing the European stakeholders, and to answer the questions that were left open in the Feasibility Study — particularly on data integration and the institutional model, where a wrong choice can lead to very long delivery time, quality control and budgeting.

We have been developing our Demo Music Observatory in the world’s 2nd ranked university-backed incubator program, the Yes!Delft AI Validation Lab since 15 September 2020. Our aim is to show a better organizational model, examples of research automation and other data integration innovation that can reduce the budgetary needs of the European Music Observatory by 80-90% and provide far more timely, accurate, and relevant service than most data observatories in Europe.

CEEMID has been creating a similar data observatory to the foreseen European Data Observatory, solely based on the contribution of about 60 European stakeholders. As the Feasibility Study suggests, we would be happy to transfer much of CEEMID’s content to the European Data Observatory, which could potentially fill up about 50-70% of the envisioned observatory. We are building our Demo Music Observatory based on the 2000 pan-European indicators collected by CEEMID since 2014.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music Diversity & Circulation Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

Illusory data gap: active and music participation is available on EU level both for gender groups or four ethnic minorities – this is regularly featured in various European CAP surveys and in our national CAP surveys, too.

The Feasibility Study is based on perceived data gaps between data needs of the European stakeholders and data availability. We have shown earlier this year to the European stakeholders that much of these data gaps are illusory. We would like to give about 50 indicators with full documentation, automated, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual refreshment for free for all music industry users. We would like to challenge the stakeholders to formulate data requests to us and think together on the ways how could the European music industry build a better observatory faster and with less cost.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music Economy Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

The Feasibility Study concludes that a “European Music Observatory would require a very significant allocation of funds, beyond what could be currently expected from the possible budget of the future Creative Europe programme”. While the Feasibility Study provide cost options, or any cost-benefit analysis, we are certain that this is an exaggeration. Most European data observatories operate with an annual 20,000-200,000-euro subsidy. We want to show with our Demo Music Observatory what can be achieved with an annual budget of 20,000 euros, 50,000 euros, 100,000 euros or 200,000 euros.

Challenge Our Demo Observatory: Check out the Music, Society and Citizenship Pillar of our Demo Music Observatory. If you do not find what you are looking for, contact us — we will try to put the data there from our repositories.

Launching Our Demo Music Observatory

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 08:00:39 +0000

Today, on 15 September 2020, we officially launched our minimal viable product as we promised to partners back in February. This was a particularly difficult period for everybody. We aspired to deliver by September in a very different environment, our hopes for commissioned work went up in flames with the pandemic, and our targeted users, musicians and music entrepreneurs, talent managers, music venues lost most of their income. The organizations helping them, granting authorities, export offices and collective management societies are overwhelmed with the problem. During these troublesome times, our team expanded, attracted great new talent, and kept working.

Our first product is the Demo Music Observatory, a collaborative, automated research-based observatory for the music industry, one that is particularly hard hit by the COVID19 crisis. Not only great artists, composers, technicians, managers fell victim to the virus, but musicians lost about 50–90% of their income from live music. This translates to a 100% loss for the live music technicians and managers.

See our earlier blogpost on what you see on the video.

The music industry was never a place for great job security. For putting up a show, you usually need a network of 10–200 artists, technicians and managers to work together as freelancers without all those social benefits that many people enjoy in other walks of life. We have been trying to figure out how to help this microenterprise and freelancer-network based industry with research for five years. Our aim is to make them competitive when they are talking with their buyers: Google, Apple, Spotify, who are really heavy-weight data and AI pros. Our better plan their tours, when they will be back on the road, to understand what sort of audiences and purchasing power waits for them in different European cities.

We are launching at a time when the music industry is crying for help.Therefore, we have decided to make our demo observatory open and unfinished. Over the last 7 years, we have built up about 2000 music and creative sector indicators to be used for business KPIs, forecasting targets, grant evaluations, royalty valuations, concert demography target group analysis and other professional uses. We would like to open up, based on your needs, about 50 well-designed indicators, and pledge to keep it daily refreshed, corrected, documented, citaable, downloadable. Also, feel free to use our most valuable source code—use it for your own purposes, even modify it, as long as you keep it open.

For our smaller partners, we follow what musicians do these days on Bandcamp: name your price. We make a pledge to our small partners: if you need reliable data to plan your next grant calls, calculate royalties, compensations, predict hit candidates, give us the job—and name your price. Post-corona, you can take for a dollar the best music from Bandcamp. You can take our research products, for a limited period, for any amount you name, as long as it is for a good cause and serves the industry, musicians, technicians or managers. In return, we ask for your feedback. Help us validate whether we are on the right track, tell us how we can cooperate after the pandemic, in better times.

Our larger and better funded partners? We ask you to pay the price we name, because we believe that it is a well-justified, fair and competitive price, set by pricing experts.

We appreciate it if you take a look at our offering, or if you pass this blogpost on to your colleagues in the industry. Our main target audience initially are music professional in broader Europe, but we are planning to cover all major global markets very soon, too. Feedback from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Colombia, Brazil & Argentina is particularly welcome as we have great plans over there!

Who we are?

We started our operations on 1 September 2020 on the basis of CEEMID, a pan-European data observatory that created about 2000 music and creative industry indicators for its users. In the coming days, we are gradually opening up about 50 music industry and 50 broader creative industry indicators in a fully reproducible workflow, with daily re-freshed, re-processed, well-formatted and documented indicators for business and policy decisions.

We would like to validate this approach in one of the world’s most prestigious university-backed incubator programs, in the Yes!Delft AI/Blockchain Validation Lab. We’re finalist on their selection, and all help before 23 September from our friends in the music industry is more than appreciated. If we get there, we can rely on probably the best pros in Europe to make our offering better tailored and financially sustainable.

Get in touch!

We use the very simple and extremely secure keybase.io, a kind of mix of Whatsapp, Skype, Google Drive, One Drive and zoom. You can get in touch on that platform with us in anytime here.

You can easily contact on LinkedIn Daniel or Kátya and of course, we have a usually working email contact form, too. Our email is name.surname at our main domain.

Video credits

Data acquisition and processing: Daniel Antal, CFA and Marta Kołczyńska, PhD (survey data).
Documentation automation: Sandor Budai
Video art: Line Matson
Music: Moon Moon Moon.