Digital Music Observatory

Discussion starter to contest the Hague Innovation Award.

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.

Public data sources are often plagued with 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 which will destroy your beautiful visualization or stop your application from working. In this example we show how we increase the usable subset of a public dataset by 66.7%, rendering useful what would otherwise have been a deal-breaker in panel regressions or machine learning applications.

Open Music Europe brings together music industry stakeholders and researchers from 12 European countries. Our partners represent the diversity of the industry, as well as the shared need to find financially, socially, and environmentally sustainable policy and business models in multiple, sometimes-fragmented streams (e.g., live music, composers/publishers, and recordings with producers and performers).

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.

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. Preprint of our article with copyright researchers.

The Feasibility Study on the European Music Observatory was published on 13 November. 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 quality, time to build, and costs.

We would like to validate our open source, open data, open collaboration based reproducible observatory concept with the Demo Music Observatory. All feedback is welcome.

CEEMID was multi-country project that was a predecessor of Reprex’s Digital Music Observatory.