Pan-European Creator Survey

The Digital Music Observatory has harmonized and collected surveys in all European countries about how musicians work and earn their living, and how audiences differ in various countries, metropolitan regions in terms of typical age, visiting probability, spending capacity, and other important factors. We helped music organizations to significantly increase the royalty pay-outs of artists in two countries, and we contributed for the advocacy of fairer compensation and fairer taxation in others.

This year we teamed up with the ReCreating Europe research consortium of renowned experts in the field of copyright, geography and economics of creativity, sociology of innovation, communication and media studies, cultural policies, Open Knowledge and access to culture, cultural policies, minority rights and disability rights. We are carrying out a truly pan-European survey in all EU languages about important topics for music and other creators:

• Understanding how much creators are aware of the legal and financial terms that online platforms use that distribute their work
• Understanding and interest in how AI algorithms contribute to the successful or not successful dissemination of their work, or can support their creative processes
• Understanding and evaluation of fairness in the way internet platforms distribute earnings to creators
• Attitudes to plagiarism, piracy, and copyright protection
• Access to Covid-19 relief funds
• No personal data is involved.

What do we ask from individual creators, bands, collectives?

• The researchers of the reCreating Europe Consortium would like to carry out an interview with you in English.
• If you are not able to carry out an interview in English, or do not want to, we would be grateful if you would still fill out the survey form (about 10 minutes) in any of the EU official languages,
• And invite a colleague/friend confident in English to do the same and volunteer for the interview at the end of the survey.

Music organizations

We would like to ask you to ask your members to do the same above, in your newsletter, Facebook page, or other means of communication. The research with free datasets, visualizations, infographics will be placed for free in the Digital Music Observatory and the Cultural and Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory and can help your own HR, advocacy, education work. (We have many other similar data assets that are already there, or we can give to you.) Therefore, it is fully compliant with GDPR—we do not want to know who fills out our survey, the interviews are voluntary, and sharing the survey can contribute to your core business.

Bloggers

We would be very happy if you would write about this survey or invite creators to participate in our research. We can give you infographics, data visualizations prior to academic publication to write about the results.

Our research principles

We believe in transparency, openness, and high-quality work. We carry out an open collaboration with representatives of music professionals, NGOs, and universities. Because in the European music ecosystem, most professional and artists are freelancers or micro-entrepreneurs, we also try to form collaborations with individuals. All our data is open, interoperable, reusable data that comes with the highest quality of documentation and help for reuse.

We would appreciate it immensely if you would support this important research by disseminating the call to participate in this study.

History

The Digital Music Observatory and its predecessor, CEEMID, has been working with harmonized surveys for 8 years. We have compiled the biggest database of interview transcripts with concert audiences (more than 70,000 interviews in all European countries, soon to be extended to more than 100k) and the world’s biggest harmonized survey dataset about music creators (4000 responses from 12 European countries.) We use the Open Data Directive, originally for government-funded research data, recently extended to taxpayer funded scientific research, to access datasets that are invisible for the music industry.