The Horizon Europe project OpenMusE is a collaboration between 15 business and academic partners from all over Europe. After half a year of cooperation, the project has made significant progress toward its goals – as formalised in a Memorandum of Cooperation between the University of Economics in Bratislava (Faculty of Business Management), the project coordinator SINUS Markt- und Sozialforschung GmbH, the Digital Music Observatory partners, and public institutions supporting the development of the music industry.
As stated in the Memorandum, our goal is to collaborate on best practices for developing and evaluating measurable indicators for the music industry, as well as transferring them to other cultural and creative industries. The goal is to facilitate public reporting on the nation's music industry with the effective use of open-source statistical software and data science methods. The intention of all partners is to improve current data collection methods and develop new methods and tools, resulting in improved indicators and recommendations relevant to cultural policymakers.
At the end of September, representatives of all partners met in Slovakia for a multi-day intensive seminar organized under the auspices of SOZA, the Institute of Cultural Policy, and the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic. The seminar focused on the synchronization of the activities that build European music ecosystems on a more competitive, fairer, and more sustainable basis. This requires evidence-based policymaking and business planning, which in turn necessitates filling gaps in the available data (identified in the Feasibility Study for the Establishment of a European Music Observatory). Together, the OpenMusE project team will assess these gaps with greater precision and contribute to new methods for bridging and filling them.
Building on this idea, the OpenMusE team will launch a pilot project related to music diversity and circulation in Slovakia, to demonstrate the feasibility of increasing the representation of local artists in radio and streaming through reliable AI and evidence-based regulatory policy
