Music And Society
Indicators related to music participation and access in European societies
In the OpenMuse WP3 Music, society, and citizenship will culminate in a pilot project conducted in Italy by MIH. The WP3 pilot project will demonstrate the ability of reproducible research and innovation tools to help MSMEs comply with
emerging social and environmental sustainability regulations, at a viable cost. Within the pilot project, MIH will utilise the OpenMuse open music data software ecosystem to create an environmental impact report – as will soon be required of many European MSMEs. For this, we will add new functionality to software that was originally developed for economic and environmental impact assessments for the Hungarian and Slovak Music Industry Reports. In addition, more detailed social and governance reporting will be carried out with MIH. As founders of the Keychange program for gender equality in music, MIH is dedicated to transferable piloting on environmental sustainability (covering greenhouse gas and water use at a minimum), social sustainability (focusing on the gender pay gap), and governance sustainability (focusing on live performance kickbacks and recorded performance payola
schemes as corruption risks in the music industry).
The environmental, social, and governance sustainability data collection will be piloted in Italy and transferred within the project lifespan to Bulgaria. As in the WP1 and WP2 pilot projects, the methods and software utilised will be fully open source, and thus open to, and replicable by, any national stakeholders who can collect the inputs required.
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Pillar 3 - Music & Society |
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Topic |
Description |
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| pillar | problem | availability | feasibility |
| Pillar 3 | Music schools and conservatories | Data gap | National statistical institutes, government data |
| Pillar 3 | Music education - formal practices | Data gap | National statistical institutes, government data, European Association for Music in Schools. |
| Pillar 3 | Music education - informal practices | Data gap | The Feasibility Study did not address this, but in popular music, informal learning practices are far-far more important. We will address this issues. |
| Pillar 3 | Training schemes for music professionals | Data gap | Lack of European data on the state of training for music professionals |
| Pillar 3 | Training schemes for artist | Data gap | Lack of European data on the state of training for artists. |
| Pillar 3 | Music education | Data gap | Lack of European data on the state of music education. |
| Pillar 3 | Consumer patterns regarding piracy and its impact on the music sector | Available | Some countries like France with Hadopi have attempted to evaluate the way consumers access illegally music while setting up educational campaigns on piracy, similar to the UK initiative Get It Right. Materials/studies are also provided by EUIPO. |
| Pillar 3 | EU consumers and music | Data gap | No authoritative assessment of the relationship between consumers and music at pan-European level |
| Pillar 3 | Social networks and music | Data gap | No authoritative assessment of how European consumers interact with music on social networks |
| Pillar 3 | Consumer patterns regarding piracy and its impact on the music sector | Available | Limited pan-European data on the impact of piracy but also on the motivations to consumer music content via illegal sources. EUIPO does have some data on the economic cost of IPR infringement in the recorded music industry. |
| Pillar 3 | Scope of the not-for-profit sector in Europe | Data gap | No mapping of the not-for-profit music sector in Europe, in particular in exposing new talent and forging social cohesion. |
| Pillar 3 | Social impact of music in communities | Data gap | Although there is some academic research available, there is no co-ordination of research on the social impact of music in Europe. |
CEEMID has collected hundreds of indicators since 2014 on this topic. We would like to invite our partners to find a few relevant indicators and publish them here. Some of these indicators require explicit permission from public bodies or from partners, given existing data acquisition costs.
Audiences
We have been carefully following the surveying guidance of the Final Report of the Working Group European Statistical System Network on Culture (in short: ESSnet-Culture) detailed guidelines can be found in the report of the Task Force on Cultural Practices And Social Aspects Of Culture.
So far, CEEMID has carried out 7 detailed, nationally representative CAP surveys for music and audiovisual use, which it retrospectively harmonized with EU 2007 and EU 2013 surveys. See further information here.
Education, training, personal development
When we presented the case-study on national and comparative evidence-based policymaking in the cultural and creative sector on the CCS Ecosystems: FLIPPING THE ODDS Conference (see an edited version of the presentation in our blogpost with further details), we emphasised a very important structural problem of the creative sectors that is a very significant burden in the case of the music industry, too.
In the music industry, most enterprises are sole proprietorships, micro- or small enterprises which do not possess strategic human resources (HR) and research and development (R&D) functions. Because music is a high-labor added, high-value added sector, participation in lifelong learning programs would be crucial, but very difficult to organize. Companies with 1-2 employees do not have specialized management and support functions, and thus have a very strong handicap in HR and R&D.
“A good example of this problem is the motion picture and TV industry. These industries were comprised of medium-sized enterprises in the 1980s with significant in-house education functions. The current structure of these industries, however, resembles music, with almost all enterprises staying below the 5-person threshold. In our experience, based on development needs assessments in the Hungarian motion picture and the Czech music industry, this creates an acute skills and labor shortage. Missing skills cannot be replaced appropriately through recruitment or with strategic HR development via life-long learning.
In addition to very reduced opportunities to participate in, and create life-long learning schemes, there are very little chances to engage in market research and R&D. While the music industry, for example, is one of the most data-driven industries in the world, the micro-enterprise size does not allow these enterprises to commission market research or hire data scientists. This leads to very asymmetrical relationships with the main distributors of music and media content on platforms that are owned by global data companies.”*
Our surveys are not only asking about the professional development of music professionals, but in some cases, they are designed to create industry-level vocational training programs.
Daniel Antal
Data Scientist & Founder of the Digital Music Observatory
Founder of the Digital Music Observatory and co-founder of Reprex.