Posts

Many people ask if we can really add value to free data that can be downloaded from the Internet by anybody. We do not only work with easy-to-download data, but we know that free, public data usually requires a lot of work to become really valuable. To start with, it is not always easy to find.

Public data sources are often plagued by missing values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, just malformatted information which will destroy your beautiful visualization or stop your application from working. In this example we show how we increase the usable subset of a public dataset by 66.7%, which is a deal-breaker in panel regressions or machine learning (AI) solutions.

We are looking for partners for the Horizon Europe call Towards a competitive, fair and sustainable European music ecosystem.

We have started to retrospectively harmonize the Music Creators Earnigs survey for the the Digital Music Observatory. Because of the relatively large sample size (n=708) we believe that imporant comparisons can be made with our CEEMID surveys despite the bias of the sample and the lack of ex ante harmonization of survey.

Reprex’s co-founder, Daniel Antal and our Listen Local curator, Marie Zhorová participated in the MaMA Festival & Convention in Paris on 13-15 October within the JUMP Music Market Accelerator Program. We introduced our Digital Music Observatory to national music organizations and encouraged them to try out a cooperation with us.

Our Digital Music Observatory contributed to the Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era project with understanding the level of justified and unjustified differences in rightsholder earnings, and putting them into a broader music economy context. The entire research paper is published by the UK Intellectual Property office, and we made the details of our analysis available in a joint publication.

If open data is the new gold, why even those who release fail to reuse it? We created an open collaboration of data curators and open-source developers to dig into novel open data sources and/or increase the usability of existing ones. We transform reproducible research software into research- as-service.

Our Digital Music Observatory contributes to the Music Creators’ Earnings in the Streaming Era project with understanding the level of justified and unjustified differences in rightsholder earnings, and putting them into a broader music economy context.

After a very thorough modernization of the package’s exception handling, documentation, and code dependencies that I did in the last week, the spotifyr package has passed again the peer-review standards and it is back on CRAN. The package is an excellent starting to point for R newbies to try their hands on musicology analysis with a few keystrokes. And of course, it is an essential part of the research infrastructure of musicology worldwide in far more advanced applications.

Live music is the breadwinner of most music professionals, artists, technicians, and managers alike, and it is a very local business. To analyze the live music economy, and its connection with the recorded music business, we need to create indicators on regional, provincial, or metropolitan area level. We just made another step to localize our Digital Music Observatory.