Digital Music Observatory on the MaMA Convention 2021, Paris, FR

Currently more than half of the global music sales are made by autonomous AI systems owned by Google, Apple, or Spotify. These data monopolies are getting rich, because they reap the profit from music businesses with an average employee count of 1.8 Europe. European music businesses are easy to exploit with armies of data engineers and data scientists because they do not have a single data scientist or even an IT function.

1. Artists in the UK had a difficulty explaining in Westminster how they are losing out in streaming– so we have created a streaming price index, like the Dow Jones, if you like, that explains the economic factors of the devaluation of music in the last 5 years in 20 countries. (See our report.)

2. Music organizations in Slovakia and Hungary were frustrated that their politicians and journalists believed music to be taxpayer funded, so we showed with data that they contribute more proportionally to the national budget than car manufacturers, the darling of local politicians (See our reports in Hungary (recast several times) and in Slovakia.)

3. We successfully challenged with data restaurant associations, hotel chains, telecom corporations and broadcasters who wanted to bring music prices down in court and via lobbying.

The music industry has envied the television and film industry which has a single go-to-point for data when it needs them, the European Audiovisual Observatory. It started lobbying for a publicly financed music observatory. But we did not wait. The music industry has a tragic track record of failed centralized international data projects. We built Reprex out of a 12-country, decentralized music project. We learned how to utilize hidden, but already existing data and research funds well, and how to manage the data governance among the poisonous conflicts of interests between rich and poor countries, authors vs producers, producer’s vs performers.

• Our Digital Music Observatory is not theoretical, it is practical, because it is built around real-life court cases, damage claims, lobbying and PR arguments.

• Our Digital Music Observatory is comprehensive – it contains more than a thousand indicators from all European countries. We have enough data to test the biases of the Spotify or the YouTube algorithm – you would be surprised what the data tells us.

• It has data available much sooner, in much higher quality and in a more practical format than in the Audiovisual one.

Presentation Slides

You can see the presentation slides here.