SKCMDb | Antal Dániel honlapja

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:00:00 +0200

Join us on 12 September 2025 at the House of Hungarian Music, Budapest for a hands-on workshop on how small labels, music libraries, and private collectors can connect their catalogues and archives to the new Open Music Europe / OpenMusE data sharing space.

We will show how the Slovak and Hungarian music data spaces — federated through the Open Music Observatory — make it easier to:

Share and repair metadata across archives, libraries, labels, and streaming platforms
Use identifiers (ISRC, ISWC, VIAF, etc.) to improve visibility and royalty distribution
Manage voluntary deposits and digital surrogates for private collections
Connect local catalogues to international platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Wikidata, MusicBrainz

Who should attend?

Independent and small labels seeking better visibility in digital distribution
Music libraries and archives aiming for cross-platform metadata integration
Private collectors interested in digitising and sharing their holdings responsibly

Why attend?

Learn how open-source tools like Wikibase make metadata sharing affordable and sustainable
Discover how services such as Unlabel help bring hidden catalogues into global circulation
Network with peers from Hungary, Slovakia, and beyond who face similar challenges

The event language is Hungarian, with support available in English. Further reading: A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei; Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Practical details

📅 Date: Friday, 12 September 2025
📍 Location: House of Hungarian Music, Városliget, Budapest
🕑 Time: 10:00–16:00 (followed by informal networking)

Participation is free, but registration is required as places are limited. The language of the event is Hungarian. We appreciate if you write on the registration form a few sentences about what you collect, what type of collections you manage, and what is your primary interest.

👉 Register here (link to be added)

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software.

Supplementary notes can be added here, including code and math.

SKCMDb

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:16:00 +0100

Please visit our poster and talk with our team members, Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Zilkova (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 10:30–11:00 in the Gallery. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Check out the entry examples related to Albrecht’s: Missa in C (printed, Hudobné centrum) with library and webshop access points, and linked data on the composition itself Q479, linked to its recorded manifestations.

Early Data Access

Next steps

The Slovak pilot illustrates how libraries and national music centres can take a central role in a decentralised European Music Observatory that federates with the EU Open Data Portal, Europeana, ECCCH, DARIAH, and Zenodo. This poster accompanies a companion contribution on the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, including the LīvMDb (Livonian Music Database), which explores how smaller regional repertoires can be embedded in broader, multimodal cultural graphs—advancing the vision of a European Music Observatory as a complement to the European Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Project History

Download our feasibility study from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

In 2020, we studied the effect of increasingly AI-driven streaming platforms on the Slovak music repertoire. We realised that music is being recommended by algorithms, not only to YouTube or Spotify subscribers but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. We realised that rights management organisations (CMOs), music information centres (MICs), and music libraries, archives, and documentation centres (MLs) must change their practices to remain competitive and visible.

In the Open Music Europe project¹, we are building a data infrastructure that aims to coordinate music knowledge (in our demonstration example, Slovak music) stored in various institutional silos and systems. We wanted to “plug in” the database of the MIC Slovak Music Centre (MCS) into a global data system like Wikipedia or Spotify and, at the same time, connect it with the Slovak CMO SOZA, the Slovak National Library and the music section of the ML Bratislava City Library. A data science company, Reprex, oversees this process.

We want to ensure that a MICs and CMOs have the most accurate information about music. Whenever data is missing or new information has yet to reach their database, we try to look up the data from reliable sources and ensure that it arrives automatically in their system (to be reviewed by a knowledgeable human curator).
Make all music in Slovakia visible on all global music systems, encyclopaedia, Europeana and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. Enable people to locate sheets of works for sale or public lending and show where people can listen to the music in various formats.
Provide the information in a dual format: enable a MIC to provide machine-readable, standardised, RDF annotated data to directly support the recommender systems of Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and other platforms.
Provide CMOs with a framework to make their members more visible to digital streaming platforms by enrichment, control and processing of available metadata and to also inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content, thus promoting local CMO members.

As seen from the points made above, this data infrastructure is beneficial to a great degree for all the parties involved.

European Interoperability Framework for Music

Nowadays most data is downloaded and used by intelligent software agents on various digital services and platforms. To meet the modern service requirements of 2025, we needed to implement an enhanced implementation of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) that extends to privately held data. We need to communicate information and metadata about Slovak music in a way that musicologists, musicians and their managers, copyright law practitioners, citizen scientists as well as software agents understand worldwide.

The EIF is a four-layered specification for how to create world-class digital public services. In music, however, the private sector is vital, too. CISAC’s members, the CMOs that register new works, are private parties. To add weight, digital streaming platforms ingest more metadata about music in a week than Europeana Sound over ten years.

On the European Interoperability Framework see: (European Commission 2017).

To ensure legal and organisational interoperability, the members of the Open Music Consortium (SOZA–Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society, MCS, Reprex) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Slovak Ministry of Culture; later, MCS, SOZA and Reprex signed a more technical MoU with the Slovak National Library².

The aim at the legal level was to understand the different rules of business and statistical confidentiality, as well as data protection rules in general. Harmonising the GDPR across a public information body like MCS and a private entity like SOZA is particularly challenging.
On the organisational level, we must ensure that different organisations (MCS, SOZA and the national library) understand each other’s data and workflows, for example, in identifying a musical work or a musical group with no legal personality.
On the semantic level, we must ensure that the databases of MCS, SOZA, and the national library understand each other.
The technical level must ensure that harmonised workflows result in successful data exchanges, given the legal constraints and semantic definitions.

In our system design, we followed two important new European initiatives. In connecting cultural data, European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCH), and the Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory. Concerning connecting authoritative data across governmental and private systems, we adhere to the novel European data governance regulations³.

A data (sharing) space is a system that integrates data whenever it is needed, or is permitted, with some labour-intensive aspects of data integration postponed until it is possible to carry them out. In a data sharing space, like Reprex’s Motion Picture Dataspace, we know where the data is in each organisation, we know its format, documentation standards, even known problems and issues. But we only load them into an application, for example, an application that calculates environmental effects or GHG emissions when it is needed and permitted. Our dataspace reduces the work in such scenarios by by setting up automatic matching and mapping generation techniques⁴.

Wikibase is the software that runs the worlds largest open knowledge graph database, Wikidata, which synchronises knowledge with about 330 (different language) Wikipedias and countless national libraries, music services, and other data sources. Our dataspace is powered by an extended and configured Wikibase system. Wikibase has often been used for authority control; it is also the system of the EU Knowledge Graph⁵.

The most notorious problem plaguing digital services and databases is the unresolved issue of named entity disambiguation. With digital services providing access to over 100 million recordings, we often find dozens of artists or works with the same title. Named-entity ambiguity is confusing for humans and for autonomous AI systems, too.

Our system focuses on harmonising the registration processes of various knowledge organisations, such as libraries and CMOs. We want to ensure that every artist, music group and the manifestation of their work in music recordings and sheets receive a globally unique and persistent identifier. We want to provide new recordings and sheets in at least one public library with a globally used VIAF (and, when applicable, an ISNI) identifier. To support named-entity disambiguation going back to hundreds of years of music creations and events diaries, we are developing trustworthy AI systems that remain strictly under human control in line with the new requirements of the EU’s AI Actt⁶.

Disseminating information

Returning to our Feasibility study, we realised that about half of the music streams had data problems. They resulted in late or missed royalty payments. We also realised that almost a fifth of the Slovak repertoire had such low-quality metadata that music recommender systems could not make sense of what their recordings work. We are changing this situation. We want to ensure that we realise if the “Internet knows” misleading information about a work or recording. Using modern data-enriching techniques, we ensure that the MCS and SOZA have the most accurate 360° views of the repertoire they represent. By data dissemination, we also guarantee that digital streaming services and search engines are informed about precise and up-to-date knowledge.

We carry out health checks on the metadata of artists and labels and highlight missing, potentially misleading, or erroneous information.
Utilising Wikidata and Wikipedia, we disseminate the correct information to streaming services and search engines (which rely on knowledge graph technologies and regularly crawl Wikidata.) We are hosting a Wikipedian in Residence to find better cooperation with the Wikipedian community and the curator community of Wikidata.
We are building the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb) that will inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content (legally stipulated) broadcasting quota, where orchestras can find for purchase or public lending scores of works or where professional and enthusiast audiences find any music ever made in Slovakia.
We are designing a new digital distribution model for non-profits and self-releasing artists who need help receiving professional service due to the low commercial value of their culturally valuable works.
We are also experimenting with data bias checks to find out about potential algorithmic biases that work against the Slovak repertoire.

Our Demo

Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (working demo)

Context: Open Music Observatory

You can read the long-form documentation of our plans here.

Our ambition with the development of the Open Music Observatory is to provide the technological basis and a practical roadmap for creating a European Music Observatory in a bottom-up, decentralised way. Instead of waiting for a grand, central agreement on what should a European music observatory be collecting and who should control it, we suggest a pragmatic approach: allow any data owners and collectors who satisfy certain quality and cooperation rules to add their data to an Open Music Observatory; when it reaches a sufficient maturity for use in Europe, then decide if its maintenance requires a new institutional form or not. You can read or regularly updated progress report on this work here.

Creating the Open Music Observatory is a cornerstone task of the Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023) Horizon Europe research and innovation project. This task is running till the end of the project (31 December 2025) with the collection, processing, and dissemination of more data and providing innovative, new data services in line with our exploitation pathways. This report is an accompanying document for the creation of Open Music Observatory as a digital infrastructure on the World Wide Web.

The Open Music Observatory is a digital service provider for the music industry that follows the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition for such services with a unique governance model. The governance model and the digital service infrastructure represent a unique innovation that considers many good examples from the European Union and other industries.

An observatory has traditionally been a permanent location for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. In the past 30 years, it has also been used for long-term digital data collection programs for markets, social sciences, and humanities. Our milestone requires the start of this observatory after a lengthy and intensive planning and prototyping phase. It can be seen as a modern reimagination of the data observatory model, or the observatory 2.0. We created a new observatory model that fully aligns with the European Interoperability Framework but extends the governance of the digital services beyond public bodies, and allows the creation of a public-private partnership to manage the observatory.

We were informed and influenced by the creation of Europeana (which started out from a similar collaborative project) and their new plans to extend their digital services into the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). We aim fully interoperability with Europeana and ECCCH, but we also bring a new element into their thinking. While they are mainly aggregating the work of public sector memory institutions, we are building a governance model that allows a more successful cooperation among the private sector and the public music sector.

By the end of 2025, we aim to create an “observatory 3.0”, which already hosts many intelligent data improvement technologies and fuels innovative applications/services in line with our project’s exploitation pathways. These services are at different maturity levels, but they could not be brought to a testable MVP without building out the minimal digital infrastructure and governance model at this milestone.

References

Antal, Dániel. 2020. ‘Feasibility Study on Promoting Slovak Music in Slovakia & Abroad’. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6427514.

Antal, Dániel, Michal Grochal, and Christos Varvantakis. 2024. ‘Building a Music Data Sharing Space with Wikibase’. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8046977.

Antal, Dániel, Ádám Lázár, and Andor Kornél Barát. 2024. ‘Open Music Observatory. Progress Report’. Digital Music Observatory. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11564114.

Bianchini, Carlo, Stefano Bargioni, and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo. 2021. ‘Beyond VIAF Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries’. Information Technology and Libraries 40 (2). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v40i2.12959.

BVDA. 2023. ‘Data Sharing Spaces and Interoperability’. Edited by Antonio Kung (Trialog), Ray Walshe (DCU), and Rigo Wenning (ERCIM). BVDA.

Curry, Edward. 2020. ‘Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques’. In Real-Time Linked Dataspaces: Enabling Data Ecosystems for Intelligent Systems, 45–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29665-0_3.

D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Strong Ideas. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/.

Diefenbach, Dennis, Max de Wilde, and Samantha Alipio. 2021. ‘[Wikibase as an Infrastructure for Knowledge Graphs: the EU Knowledge Graph]{.nocase}’. In ISWC 2021, 12922:631–47. Online, France: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4\37.

Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission), Pere Brunet, Livio De Luca, Eero Hyvönen, Adeline Joffres, Peter Plassmeyer, Martijn Pronk, Roberto Scopigno, and Gábor Sonkoly. 2022. [Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage: ex – ante impact assessment]{.nocase}. LU: Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014.

ESS. 2017. ‘Position Paper on Access to Privately Held Data Which Are of Public Interest’. European Statistical System. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/13019146/13346094/ESS+Position+Paper+on+Access+to+privately+held+data+final+-+Nov+2017.pdf/6ef6398f-6580-4731-86ab-9d9d015d15ae?t=1511447619000.

———. 2022. Privately Held Data Communication Toolkit. 2022nd ed. Manuals and guidelines. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive. 2019. Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on Open Data and the Re-Use of Public Sector Information. Official Journal of the European Union. Vol. OJ L. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj.

EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act. 2022. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2022/868 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2022 on European data governance and amending Regulation (EU) 2018/1724 (Data Governance Act) (Text with EEA relevance)]{.nocase}’. EUR-Lex. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/868/oj.

EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act. 2024. ‘[Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act)]{.nocase}’. OJ OJ L 2024/1689 (July): 1–144. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj.

European Commission. 2017. ‘European Interoperability Framework – Implementation Strategy. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament the Council the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions’. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52017DC0134.

European Commission, and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. 2019. Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2759/346720.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, M Clarke, P Vroonhof, J Snijders, A Le Gall, B Jacquemet, et al. 2020. Feasibility Study for the Establishment of a European Music Observatory : Final Report. Publications Office. https://doi.org/doi/10.2766/9691.

Fagerving, Alicia. 2023. ‘Wikidata for Authority Control: Sharing Museum Knowledge with the World’. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications 5 (1): 222–39. https://doi.org/10.5617/dhnbpub.10665.

Hudobné centrum, Reprex B.V., and Slovenská národná knižnica, and Slovenský ochranný zväz autorský. 2024. ‘Memorandum o porozumení vo vzťahu k Slovenskej súhrnnej hudobnej databáze]’.

Ministerstvo kultúry SR, and Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘Memorandum o porozumení o využití výsledkov analýz otvorených politík v kontexte slovenského kultúrneho a kreatívneho priemyslu a sektorových verejných politík v spolupráci s konzorciom pre výskum a inovácie s názvom OpenMuse. $$Memorandum of Understanding on utilizing the Open Policy Analysis results of the OpenMuse Research and Innovation Consortium in the context of Slovak cultural and creative industries and sectors’ public policies$$’. https://www.crz.gov.sk/zmluva/7645338/.

Open Music Europe. 2023. ‘[Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems]{.nocase}’. https://doi.org/10.3030/101095295.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe, research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement No. 101095295 (Open Music Europe (OpenMusE) – An Open, Scalable, Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems (Open Music Europe 2023)). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. ↩︎
See the references (Ministerstvo kultúry SR and Open Music Europe 2023; Hudobné centrum et al. 2024) ↩︎
See on the ECCH (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (European Commission) et al. 2022) and the European Music Observatory (European Commission et al. 2020); on connecting the (public) European Statistical System with privately-held data: (ESS 2017, 2022); and as a general legal framework the Open Data Directive and the Data Governance Act (EU 2019/1024 Open Data Directive 2019; EU 2022/868 Data Governance Act 2022). ↩︎
You can read more in less technical language about this approach in Dataspaces: Fundamentals, Principles, and Techniques (Curry 2020), and in a more technical specification in Data Sharing Spaces And Interoperability (BVDA 2023). Reprex is an affiliated member of the Big Data Value Association (BVDA). ↩︎
The knowledge graph of the European Union: (Diefenbach, Wilde, and Alipio 2021); use for cultural authority control: (Bianchini, Bargioni, and Pellizzari di San Girolamo 2021; Fagerving 2023). Our solution: (Antal, Grochal, and Varvantakis 2024). ↩︎
Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (European Commission and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology 2019); Artificial Intelligence Act (EU 2024/1689 Artificial Intelligence Act 2024). We were greatly informed by Data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020) on the intersectional escalation of data biases that leads to disadvantages to women, small countries, or independent repertoires. ↩︎

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Fullscreen: F

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

What we actually do?

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Fullscreen: F

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Hachaton, Registers for Cultural Entities

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

The slides are best viewed with fullscreen mode:
press Ⓕ

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc|

Hallgass hazai zenéket

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

The slides are best viewed with fullscreen mode:
press Ⓕ

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc|

IDCC24 Lightning Talk Session

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:15:00 +0000

Open Music Europe is a Horizon Europe project that aims to build a working prototype of the planned European Music Observatory.

Interested in our automated data observatories? Let us meet in Edinburgh on the 18th International Digital Curation Conference and discuss who you could use our open-source, collaborative data infrastructure and know-how.

The EU, UN, or other international bodies have recognised or initiated at least 60 data observatories that carry out long-term data collection on various domains; we have not found any good policies or practices on how to place these observatories on data infrastructures that are interoperable towards open science and open government. We are creating a data management and governance model and a working MVP that coordinates data collection and statistical data production among scientific, private and official statistical actors.

Our most crucial pilot project wants to showcase a best practice for using privately-held data, i.e., data of music organisations and surveys carried out by scientific and business actors, to improve the quality of government statistics. We show how the guidelines on using private data as an ‘administrative data source’ and an ex-ante harmonisation of governmental surveys with open scientific surveys can result in high-quality datasets that fully complement the pre-existing official statistical products and commercial products.

As a coordination tool, we started developing a Data Management Plan to increase transparency from the outset. Apart from applying Horizon Europe’s OpenAIRE recommendations and FAIR requirements, we use the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines to bring open science transparency into the less standardised policy analysis area. We implement this following various UN/EU Guidelines on statistical production, creating a three-way reconciliation and interoperability, i.e., scientific research, public policy design and official statistics.

Click through to our working paper (available in PDF, epub, and html).

Our work contributes to sharing outputs earlier using Open Research platforms because we are building a framework supported by research automation that integrates open science, business, and official governmental data. We develop a software ecosystem complementing the R statistical environment and language, the lingua franca of official and scientific statistics, to make the data curation, pre-processing, processing, and eventual quality-controlled statistical data release open, transparent, and much timelier.

Our project follows an open collaboration framework that we design so that private music NGOs and enterprises, statistical offices and open science research groups can work together on the curation and design, production and release and use of data assets in the cultural domain. By opening the statistical infrastructure with our open-source production code and implementing the statistical data and metadata exchange standards simultaneously with other metadata standards and standardisation techniques like ex-ante and retrospective survey harmonisation, we hope to combine them in novel ways like never before while making them available sooner.

https://music.dataobservatory.eu/documents/open_music_europe/slovakia/slovak-cult-stat-pilot.html

Our showcase product will be a twin, linked open data resource: the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. It will connect in unprecedented detail information about musical works and their sound recordings and notations in music libraries, heritage organisations and individual and collective rights management organisations. We will derive the Slovak Music Industry Registry from this linked open resource that we will convert into a structural business register satellite as an interface between the privately-held data of music management and music heritage institutions and the national/satellite account system of the Slovak Republic, particularly the Slovak Cultural and Creative Satellite Accounts.

Let’s get in touch if you are interested.

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Daniel Antal, as the co-founder of Reprex is honoured to be invited to the final event of the wonderful Creative FLIP program. Our Digital Music Observatory in many ways gained momentum from the CCS Ecosystems: Evidence-Driven CCI Policy & The Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report discussion in 2020, just before the terrible pandemic hit us all.

Blogpost for discussion: Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task? Creating a more flexible and useful business and occupational categorisations for the music and film industries.

More than two years have passed since Creative FLIP kicked-off a new project cycle, continuing to pursue its overall goal, to support a healthy ecosystem for the cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI). This is how we work – the launch of the online platform on status and working conditions of artists and cultural professionals is only one of many highlights to expect! Cruise along our flagship initiative, Creatives Unite, and discover its new look and tools, engage in discussions about the power of transformation policies, cross-sectoral cooperation, and platforms for peer exchanges. We will inquire if we should categorize CCSI occupations and why we need to talk about social inclusion, sustainability, greening and more transversal topics when discussing the future of the sector.

In this panel on the FLIP FORWARD Final Conference organised together with the CHARTER project (See: Factsheets: Families of competences pdf) we want to discuss the benefits but also the dangers of categorisation related to the self-image, the measurement, but also the visibility of the CCSI: categorisation enables a highlighting of similarities, but it also has the potential to exclude the unforeseen, the evolving, the fringes.

Our discussion will focus on cultural-creative occupations and be organised around the following questions:

To what extent do the categoriser’s viewpoint and goals shape the categories?
What are the limitations and dangers of categorising the occupational scope of the CCS?
Is it possible to develop an occupational categorisation of the CCS that serves all purposes? If not, how do you deal with this dilemma?

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch.

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 17:48:00 +0100

I am honoured to be invited to the final event of the wonderful Creative FLIP program. Our Digital Music Observatory in many ways gained momentum from the CCS Ecosystems: Evidence-Driven CCI Policy & The Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report discussion in 2020, just before the terrible pandemic hit us all. Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch and let us meet at the event.

It is one of our most fundamental cognitive abilities to identify shared features or similarities of objects, events, or ideas and then to group (“categorise”) these to make sense of the world. Without categorisation, learning, language, memory, and decision making (to name a few only) would be impossible. The production of cultural statistics also depends on categorisation, distinguishing what is to be measured and what is not.

Session: Categorizing CCS - an impossible task?

In this panel on the FLIP FORWARD Final Conference organised together with the CHARTER project (See: Factsheets: Families of competences pdf), we want to discuss the benefits but also the dangers of categorisation related to the self-image, the measurement, but also the visibility of the CCSI: categorisation enables a highlighting of similarities, but it also has the potential to exclude the unforeseen, the evolving, the fringes.

Our discussion will focus on cultural-creative occupations and be organised around the following questions:

To what extent do the categoriser’s viewpoint and goals shape the categories?
What are the limitations and dangers of categorising the occupational scope of the CCS?
Is it possible to develop an occupational categorisation of the CCS that serves all purposes? If not, how do you deal with this dilemma?

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch.

One of the most fundamental problems of developing creative businesses in Europe and developing public policies to support them is that we have far less business and policy planning information available then any business in fruit farming, manufacturing of cars or providing banking services. Cultural statistics have a very low coverage in music or film. Indicators that an apple producer, a car component manufacturer or a bank supplier can take for granted, such as total or average gross value added in a country, employment, or wage statistics, do not exist.

The lack of statistical coverage makes it particularly difficult for such creative businesses and their industry organisations to comply with the expectations of the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive or participate in the advantages of green financing and the European Green Deal.

The production of statistics for the music or the film industry, like any other industry, relies on three fundamental categorisations:

the categorisations of economic activities that creative businesses and self-employed people do;
the categorisations of their products and services (such as films or sound recordings);
the categorisation of occupations and jobs available or filled with such occupations.

These categorisation do not work well in the cultural and creative sectors, and perhaps in some other services sector either.

To help small enterprises in music or film, we need different data collection and statistical or indicator production procedures and more flexible categorisation processes to support their business development on enterprise or a regional/national level. Photo: Jan Demiralp on Unsplash.

Why normal business and occupation categories fail to work in the creative sectors?

Unfortunately, these categorisations cannot be successfully applied in the music or the film industry for many reasons:

The entities are too small.
They have mixed activities.
They mainly employ people atypically without even checking their formal qualifications.

A small recording studio that works for films or the music industry, or a small company that offers stage or in-studio or on-set lightning typically employs people who learned their skills on the job; they often do various related activities, so their NACE code is not very characteristic. Also, because of their size, they hardly ever participate in governmental statistical surveys.

On a more fundamental level, in the creative industries, the dominant firm size is the microenterprise, where the management functions are usually not specialised and often not filled by people with business administration degrees: they do not have an HR department or even an HR function that would categorise their jobs; they do not have a management controlling system that would rely on a sophisticated bookkeeping or a well-categorised inventory of sales. This is what the International Labour Organization, or employment policymakers, describe as “informal enterprises”: they do not have formal internal structures, processes, and often even contracts that in larger enterprises enable a professional management of product, career, finances, or sustainability.

In Open Music Europe, building on a decade of experience at the Digital Music Observatory, we are using statistical processes and data innovation to serve the needs of the music industry by providing data on royalty collection, marketing, average artist remuneration, or gross value added. Our approach is based on innovative statistical procedures and recent regulatory changes that allow national statistical authorities to embrace them.

We do not have average musician remuneration statistics or gross value-added figures for music labels because even though musicians and record labels participate in the national statistical system, they are invisible as they do not have a clear category. The NACE categorisation system does not contain the activities of the “music industry”, only categories like “audiovisual” or “art performances” categories that mix up the numbers of the music industry with television, video production, or theatres. The same can be said of most occupations where music businesses employ workers or self-employed professionals. Even though they have a chance to participate in statistical surveys, which call upon a randomly selected list of small enterprises (in the case of business surveys) or people (in the case of the labour force surveys), they do not get an appropriate “musician” or “music business” label.

The categorisation or labelling of “performing arts” or “audiovisual” is unsuitable for a musician or filmmaker. If “audiovisual” average wages rise in a region, who are they supposed to know if this is due to outsourcing some film post/production to the region or an uptake in music recording activities? After all, film sound studios and music recording studios work for different markets and employ different people.

On the other hand, many creative industries know who belongs to their industry. Architects usually must fulfil severe qualification requirements and register into a local chamber of architects. Musicians must register with author’s and performer’s collective management societies if they want to receive copyright or neighbouring right royalties. If we can align such representative creative organisations with the statistical processes, we will get indicators that follow relevant categorisations for musicians, record labels or architects.

Several statistical and data innovations can make such an alignment or data coordination possible.

See: United Nations Guidelines on Statistical Business Registers pdf. European Business Statistics Methodological Manual for Statistical Business Registers. 2021 Edition.

Sample surveying, when musicians (as members of the working force) or their enterprises (as small businesses) are selected by a lottery to fill out a questionnaire, had been the most important source of official statistics between 1970 and 2010, but they are less and less used. Before the 1970s, we only had fewer statistics on full census-like questionnaires with no random sampling. In the last decade, we have seen more and more often that statistical offices directly connect to various “registers” or databases initially created for business or tax administration purposes to retrieve the data. Why ask a musician about her royalties if we can access her royalty account directly?

Why ask a musician about her royalties if we can access her royalty account directly? Accessing data that is available in a well-managed administrative source, such as a national royalty accounting system is cheaper, faster and more accurate.

From a royalty account, we can access more precise and timely information than from the memory of an artist.

In the last decade, UNECE and Eurostat have been the forerunners with several European national statistical offices in finding new ways to tap into so-called “privately held” registers, for example, the royalty accounts of copyright management societies, who have a full view of musicians in the country and precise and relevant information about their earnings, and indirectly about their employment or gross value added.

Economy of music in Europe: Novel data collection methods and indicators

In Slovakia, we are working out a process where the register and framework of the official data collection could be aligned with a private register set up by the music industry’s nationally representative stakeholders. Such a scheme would have many advantages both for the private and the public parties:

The collection of the statistical data would be faster, cheaper and more precise.
The data could be securely mapped to and from the NACE/ISCO categorisation used by the government and the relevant categorisations used by the music industry.
Whenever the music sector – a relatively minor part of the services business sector – would be under-sampled in a statistical survey methodology to produce reliable, music sector-specific data, additional, harmonised surveys or administrative data could ensure that minimum amount of music enterprise and musician data is present for quality-controlled statistical indicators.
The music businesses could professionalise their company planning HR processes, and, critically, have relevant benchmarks for environmental and social sustainability management; they could participate in the European Green Deal.

Are you in Brussels on 15-16 November? Interested? Get in touch!

Cover photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash.

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

SKCMDb: The Slovak Comprehensive Music Database

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Enter full screen mode: F

forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End
Overview: Esc or zoom with Alt + Click️

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Wikimuseum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Press `F` on your keyboard

Enter full screen mode: on your keyboard

Full screen: F or Overview: Esc
forward: ️> or [spacebar] | back :️<
home: Home and to the end: End

🖱 blue letters: clickable link

Building Blocks

Wikibase: SKCMDb, FUDSS.
SPARQL Endpoint: [requires password]
Sampo Semnantic Browser (beta): http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/
Project Information: https://reprex.nl/project/skcmdb/
👉 Help Us Build a Truly Inclusive European Music Observatory (invitation blogpost)

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

Connect: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

SKCMDb | Antal Dániel honlapja

Workshop on Metadata Sharing for Small Labels, Libraries, and Collectors

Who should attend?

Why attend?

Practical details

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

SKCMDb

Early Data Access

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo Semantic Browser

Next steps

Project History

European Interoperability Framework for Music

Music Data Sharing Space

Disseminating information

Our Demo

Context: Open Music Observatory

References

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Slide navigation

What we actually do?

Questions?

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Slide navigation

Questions?

Hachaton, Registers for Cultural Entities

Slide navigation

Hallgass hazai zenéket

Slide navigation

IDCC24 Lightning Talk Session

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Categorizing Cultural & Creative Sectors: An Impossible Task?

Why normal business and occupation categories fail to work in the creative sectors?

Interoperability of Music Libraries and Archives with Public and Private Music Services

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

SKCMDb: The Slovak Comprehensive Music Database

Slide Navigation (press F)

Building Blocks

Questions?

Wikimuseum

Slide Navigation

Press F on your keyboard

Building Blocks

Questions?

Press `F` on your keyboard

Press `F` on your keyboard