Retrospective Harmonization of UK Music Creators Earnings Survey

We have started to retrospectively harmonize the Music Creators Earnigs survey for the the Digital Music Observatory. The survey’s raw data is accessible on the website of the UKIPO here.

Ex post harmonization will be limited, because of the following factors:

• The MCE survey did not use harmonized questions in many cases
• The MCE surveys answers do not cover a full range of possible answers
• The MCE survey does not appear to represent the UK artists and music professionals.

Because of the bias of the survey, we did not include statistical indicators of the survey yet in our observatory, but we made the processed data available on our open repository space on Zenodo. Nevertheless, because of the relatively large sample size (n=708) we believe that imporant comparisons can be made with our CEEMID surveys, and we can shed some light on the earnings distribution of UK artists, and the way they distribute and finance their recordings.

Reprex and the Digtail Music Observatory were commissioned to prepare an analysis on the justified and not justified differences in music creators’ earnings. We have posted our most important findings in an earlier blogpost (Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era. United Kingdom Research Cooperation With the Digital Music Observatory.