SurveyHarmonies: Participate in the International Music Professionals Survey

In the SurveyHarmonies project, we created various tools to “recycle” existing surveys about music professionals and music audiences. By combining existing survey elements with building new music-related surveys, we not only collect original data but can immediately compare them with data from the source surveys. This way, we can unleash the power of survey harmonization, open data, and open-source scientific software for music industry stakeholders who lack in-house access to these rare and cutting-edge skills.

Harmonized surveys increase the efficiency and impact of social sciences surveys in many ways. Harmonized surveys are particularly useful for learning from international best practices (how your country compares to the best practice country); comparative valuation; understanding the dynamics of gender inequalities in an international and time-wise comparison, or simply conducting higher-value academic or market research.

Stop reinventing the wheel

Our question bank contains curated survey questions in the English (master), Bulgarian, German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Slovak languages. These questions are designed by survey professionals and have been used multiple times in the past.

Using our harmonized question bank has many advantages:

• The questions – both the English-language master versions and the translations – are formed and structured in a way that has been tested by many thousands of respondents (sometimes even hundreds of thousands or millions). You do not have to spend resources on testing the questions.
• We harmonized the concepts, which are verbalized in the questions, in a way that the answers can be immediately joined with recycled survey answers, official statistics, and open science resources.
• You can still add your own questions, but you do not have to worry about questions that have been asked of music audiences and music professionals (artists, technicians, managers, etc.) in the past.

Recycle and harmonize answers

The use of harmonized questions has a unique value proposition: your answers can be immediately compared to how music audiences or professionals answered the same questions in previous years, in other countries, or other regions. This brings particular impact where socioeconomic factors are concerned. For instance, when you ask about the side jobs of musicians, you can directly compare them with your country’s or region’s occupation statistics. Likewise, when you ask about the incomes of musicians or audiences, you can immediately compare these with the correct income statistics of the relevant region or country.

Multiple languages

We aim to provide harmonized surveys in all EU official languages and, when possible, also in minority languages. Multi-language surveying is expensive and hard because you must develop, test, and collect answers for exactly the same questionnaire in several languages. The answers need to be re-coded in a retrospective harmonization process.

Try it out

In the SurveyHarmonies project financed by MusicAIRE, SINUS creates an exploratory workflow that integrates many open-source scientific applications and open governmental or scientific data sources. In late January 2023, we will conduct a multi-country test of the results and collect user feedback afterward.

• For music organizations that contribute to our survey, we will create a free, multi-country report, which will:
• Identify the income sources of music professionals in the target countries and track how they have changed since 2019;
• Measure the income level of music professionals and track how it has changed since 2019;
• Explore music professionals’ perceptions of gender inequalities and corruption, both within the music industry and in the target countries more generally.
• Compare music professionals’ sources of income, income levels, and perceptions of gender inequalities and corruption with the general population in the target countries and the EU as a whole.