Disseminating Knowledge: Starting the Digital Music Observatory Publications Series

Open Music Europe aims to create a decentralised, working prototype for a future European Music Observatory. We aim to show a novel governance model, data stewardship, research data management, and various open-source tools to create the four pillars of the future European observatory: music economy, music diversity and circulation, citizenship, society, sustainability, and the support of music innovation.

Open Collaboration

Because four MusicAIRE projects had already been involved in the prototyping work within the scope of the Horizon Europe research and innovation Open Music Europe project, it was logical to start expanding our Observatory Stakeholder Network in this community. We want to demonstrate that we can place the infrastructure of open data, open science, and the web of data relevant to evidence-driven policy work, business, and scientific research. We want to increase the impact of our network members and provide them with automatically collected, processed and validated fresh information.

Green ME

Our first book-form release is the Environmental Sustainability Guide For Enterprising Musicians, an educational guidebook developed by Reina Sofía Music School for entrepreneurial classical musicians. We chose this publication to be the first because it fits in spirit and target group with two of the Open Music Europe research areas and two important pillars of the observatory: sustainability and employment.

Disseminating data and knowledge

We encourage our stakeholders to bring in their knowledge, data, and of course, data problems in measurement, control and reporting integrated economic, environmental and social sustainability management. While reliable data in the form of institutional KPIs defined in the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, or benchmarks and Science-Based Targets, are vital data needs for the triple transition, we envision the future European Music Observatory as a knowledge platform. Therefore, we started the publication of book-form longer policy documents and educational material besides our datasets and open source code.

We greatly emphasise building an observatory prototype that meets FAIR open science data management standards, the Open Policy Analysis Guidelines, and interoperability with Eurostat, UNESCO or the EU Open Data Portal. While our first full-fledged release is expected only in Q2 2024, some of our services are already available for testing.