7 Data Improvement & Innovation
The music sector was one of the early adopters of digitisation and is a highly data-driven sector of the economy. Because it relies on data, business and public policy problems often accompany data problems. In the previous section, we have shown how we aim to increase the data available for the sector. Now, we focus on improving the data’s quality and usability.
7.2 Use Cases
In 2023 the Open Music Europe
project applied for the Module A of the Horizon Results Booster (HRB) provided by Trust-IT Services↗. The HRB aims to provide a tangible contribution to the dissemination of results and recommendations of research projects related to the European Commission Priority areas.
7.2.1 Data Health Services for Collective Management
Entity linking and data linking are among the biggest technical problems in rights management. Because music authors, producers, and performers have three royalty streams and do not share an interoperable registry, the connection of musical works (compositions, ideally identified by an ISWC code), their sound recording manifestations (identified on all digital services with and ISRC code), and the various identifiers of performers require costly manual and technical identification.
There are numerous projects underway in the music industry to resolve this problem going forward. In the United Kingdom, PRS’s Nexus programme↗ is developing a solution with the provisioning of preliminary ISWC registration to keep the recording and composition connected from the birth of a new recording.
The Open Music Europe
project, on the other hand, is pioneering a different route for already existing sound recordings, with the linking of public sector catalogues of heritage and library collections with rights management information; particularly with relying on the VIAF shared authority files. SOZA and Reprex are expected to present their MVP on the CISAC Good Governance seminar in December 2025.
Modern registers typically assign a unique identifier, known as a URI, to their data subjects (our registered objects). A ‘Cool URI’, which resembles a URL, offers a practical advantage. When used as a URL, it generates a human-readable HTML file about the registered person or object. This can be particularly useful when processed by a graph application, as it provides crucial information about this person or object in a machine-readable (XML, JSON, TTL, or NQUAD) file.
For example, the VIAF identifier number 89006617
can be placed into the http://viaf.org/viaf/89006617 URL, which provides as access to the cataloging information of works created by, or written about the great etnomusicologist and modern composer, Béla Bartók.
Bartók, Béla, 1881-1945. Bartók, Béla
Modern platforms, such as Spotify, use similar identifiers. For example, the Spotify Artist ID 2fIUlieTjLTaNQUIKHX5B8
resolves to Celeste Buckingham’s available recordings on the platform via the URL https://open.spotify.com/artist/2fIUlieTjLTaNQUIKHX5B8.
The problem is that music creators are often present on more than 200 digital platforms, each of which has its identifier policy and requires the repeated import of the artists’, works’, and recordings’ data. To consistently report such metadata is costly and complex, even for major labels and publishers with a dedicated IT system. No wonder we saw before our project in our own Feasibility study that more than 50% of artist data needed fixing on digital platforms.
Relying on many local identifiers on otherwise interconnected computer systems will always create a costly and error-prone data exchange. Unfortunately, the music industry has never agreed to use genuinely open, high-quality registers. These changes were made during the period of our project. For example, large platforms like Apple, Spotify, and some collective rights management organisations started using the ISO-standard name identifier (ISNI) to avoid the high prevalence of multiple same-name persons and musical groups. This transition is yet to begin, and it is incomplete, so the music sector will likely need to invest large IT resources into entity resolution in the next decade.
7.2.2 Sustainability Reporting for Music Organisations
The Music Innovation Hub and Reprex will develop a CSRD-compliant sustainability reporting tool in 2024-2025. The reporting tool aims to provide an accurate and affordable ESG reporting facility that follows the European ESRS standards for music enterprises that create their financial reports according to the simplified reporting rules allowed by member states for microenterprises.
More than 95% of European music enterprises (in some member states, this reaches 100%) apply simplified financial reporting. For such companies, there are no CSRD-compliant ESG reporting tools.
We identify the reason for this market failure as follows:
The MVP of this service was developed with a MusicAIRE microgrant, and it is the project’s background. A scale-up will be demonstrated with the use the Open Music Observatory’s open data API.
7.2.3 Listen Local
In 2020, with a microgrant from the Slovak Arts Council, we created a Feasibility Study and a demo application called Listen Local (Antal 2020). The study examined why the Spotify algorithm struggled to recommend Slovak music within Slovakia for Slovak people. We also created a demo application that modified the user’s Spotify recommendations to voluntarily comply with the local content guidelines applicable to local radio stations. The user could also listen to a lower or higher percentage of regional works.
Our critical finding was the very pool data coverage and quality of the Slovak repertoire, which is mainly sent to distribution without the professional assistance of a commercial music label. Self-releasing artists and micro labels do not have the necessary metadata know-how, IT and data specialists to prepare their new releases for algorithmic curation by recommender engines of digital streaming platforms, radio stations, or large festivals.
We aim to develop applications to create a local content-aware public performance music stream.
7.2.4 Unlabel
Unlabel
is a planned service aimed at self-releasing artists and micro labels that need a functional data/IT department. Therefore, they are at a disadvantage compared to significant independent and major releases because they usually need to meet the high documentation standards necessary for a successful digital distribution strategy and engagement with algorithmic curation of streaming-, radio-, or festival playlists.
Self-releasing artists and micro labels bring ill-documented new content to digital distributors like ALOADED. Digital distributors must maintain an arm’s length standard for all labels, small or large, independent or major. ALOADED or other distributors cannot cross-finance the data problems of self-releasing and micro-label artists from the client revenues of more prominent labels.
We identify the problem as a market failure and a technical failure:
Our planned “Unlabel” service will provide documentation and metadata improvement services for self-releasing artists. This service, similar to current white-label services, will strictly address market failures and not compete with label services. We aim to provide a necessary level of data consolidation and improvement so that these artists can have equal opportunities in digital distribution services.
The service will be connected to the Slovak Music Dataspace and its Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. We will provide a PPP business model for the onboarding and proper documentation of self-releasing artists on a large scale and the efficient, API-based provision of their digital distributor. Aloaded will provide the distribution services, Reprex will provide the data services, and SOZA and the Slovak Music Center will work out the details of minimal customer service for such labels.
7.3 Use of AI systems
For the entity linking, related to our planned value added Section 7.2.1, we are planning to use in the future AI algorithms, particularly inference engines. The main goal of the system is to help matching correctly named entities, particularly rightsholders, musical works and recordings. The system is not yet in place. An adequate description will be provided for overview and will be brought to the attention of the Ethics Advisor during the upcoming meeting of the Ethics Board.
We cannot provide a full risk assessment because the service is not planned in detail yet. However, our preliminary risk assessment suggests low levels of risk, partly, because we plan to deploy AI in music/culture, which as a domain not seen as a high-risk area by the European regulation, and partly, because our system will not autonomous, will retain human-in-control, and will not influence the decisions or anyhow engage with end-users.
We were conscious of the potential risk involved, and both the control structure and the data governance were planned over the course of 10 months.
We do not consider that the system has wider risks or negative impacts. The algorithm is designed to cure sources of data biases that result in a late or missed payment for some rightsholders.