Open Access Music Dataspaces – Open Music Observatory
Abstract
This presentation introduces the Open Music Observatory and its national pilot, the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database, as emerging pillars of a federated European music data ecosystem. It outlines the metadata gaps identified in the Feasibility Study for a European Music Observatory and demonstrates how open data reuse, cross-stakeholder collaboration, and interoperable knowledge graphs can address missing, fragmented, or inaccessible music metadata. Using Slovakia as a case study, the presentation shows how poor metadata quality affects local repertoire visibility—such as the misclassification of small repertoires in recommendation systems—and how open, semantically aligned dataspace infrastructures can improve discoverability, rights management, and cultural statistics. The presentation highlights practical applications including entity reconciliation, multilingual authority control, and connections between library, rights-management, and streaming metadata. By implementing the European Interoperability Framework across technical, semantic, organisational, and legal layers, the Open Music Observatory demonstrates a scalable, ethical method for building cross-domain cultural data services capable of supporting policy, research, and public access.
Full text
From Data to Discovery Open Access Music Dataspaces –Open Music Observatory SOZA / REPREX 20.11.2025 Linecheck Milan DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17669739 Tomáš Mikš/ Daniel Antal
Reeprex B.V. Feasibility study for a European Music Observatory Key policy document guiding our work Identifies nearly 40 data gaps that burden both policy work and music business operations. These include data that are: -Scarce - the amount of available data is insufficient -Fragmented - data has to be collected from numerous different sources -Hidden - data might well exist, but cannot be found -Restricted - the data cannot be accessed due to technical or IP barriers -Unharmonised - the accessed data needs extensive and resource-intense pre-processing We have demonstrated that many of these gaps can be filled through open data reuse, cross-stakeholder data sharing, improved surveying, harmonisation, and other novel methods.
3 Slovakia
Starting point 1. Why online platforms do not recommend music from Slovakia in Slovakia for Slovak people? 2. How can we avoid that small repertoires lose their original market, their only market? Findings 1. Small repertoires have very low-quality data representation 2. Because of low income, data improvement and documentation must not be expensive 3. Public-Private Partnership is needed to solve data problems
OpenMusE | WP Presentation 5 The opposite of success It is often hard to say what would be a perfect metadata, or what we want to do with the data. We started with the nightmare scenario: that a new release ends of on Forgotify, a funny service that plays songs which had never been played on Spotify. We realised that many songs, often locally well-know records, end up here with wrong data, because recommender systems place them on the wrong shelf and recommend them to an inappropriate audience.
Open Music Europe & Slovak Music Dataspace
Open Music Observatory Timeline 2020 2019 2026 Slovak Music Industry Report CEE Report Feasibility Study, Eu best practice, Yes!Delft AI Lab Digital Music Observator, JUMP Music Market Accelerator, SK Feasibility Study Various Use Cases, Grant Application Open Music Europe Open Music Observatory Open Music Observatory applications Full European federation AI Act CSRD Open Music Europe DGA, EIF Act Horizon Europe call Feasibility studies Triple Transition Music Moves Europe 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 OpenMusE | WP Presentation 7
European Interoperability Framework: Layers of Service Interoperability rability Framework: Layers of Service Interoperability Technical interoperability Semantic interoperability Organisational interoperability Legal interoperability Integrated service governance Rules of the data exchanges and use is harmonised to a level that negotiations and permits can be obtained fast to join the data. Organisations harmonise their internal workflows and jobs that use data to benefit the most from improving and enriching their own data with other sharing partner’s data. The jobs and workflows of the organisations in the data space share a vocabulary of meanings of the collected and shared data’s definitions and meanings. The data is translated to a standard graph format with shared annotation so that it can be easily exchanged, synchronized among partners.
1. Data enrichment Reprex consolidates the data Excel, CSV, SQL and other database (data file) formats of SOZA, Slovak Music Centre, Music Fund, and other organisations into a graph format. We assist curators to find and improve errors in their metadata. We ensure that the resulting data is more usable for rights management, heritage management, publishing. 2. Data dissemination We send the enriched and proprietary (confidential) data to the systems of SOZA, Slovak Music Centre, Music Fund or other participants. We sent the public data to the EU Open Data Portal (statistical data), to EOSC (data of scientific value), collections data (Europeana and ECCH), and biographical and repertoire data to Wikidata and Wikipedia. This way DSPs can use reliable data about Slovak music. OpenMusE | WP Presentation 9
Review of data catalogues, faceted search, API, chatbot
Parallels with the MLC (USA) 1. In its first 18 months, the US MLC recovered a substantial amount of unpaid royalties, mainly benefiting independent artists. 2. Our experience in Slovakia also shows that a large proportion of royalties are often delayed, lost, or left unclaimed due to poor metadata. 3. Too often, the cost of collecting small payments outweighs the royalties themselves. The European Music Observatory must be built to support and strengthen the effort to make royalty collection cheaper, faster, and more accurate by fixing the data at its source. $426,879,731
Reprex B.V. One Song, Two Paths of Use Different licences govern what you can copy —and what you can play. # --- Commercially released song ---------------------------------------------- wd:Q4745 a wikibase:Item ; rdfs:label "Tšitšōrlinki, tšitšōrlinki (commercial release)"@en ; schema:description "Commercially released version of the traditional Livonian folk song, performed by Hilda Grīva."@en ; p:P410 s:Q4745-spotify-access . # access point → Spotify link (statement node) # --- Statement node for the access point ------------------------------------- s:Q4745-spotify-access a wikibase:Statement ; ps:P410 <https://open.spotify.com/track/123456789abcdef> ; # Spotify player URL pq:P483 wd:Q5989 . # qualifier: has policy → Listen on Spotify # --- The policy item ---------------------------------------------------------- wd:Q5989 a wb:UsePolicy ; rdfs:label "Listen on Spotify"@en ; schema:description "You may listen to this recording via the Spotify web or mobile player, free or by subscription, according to Spotify’s End User License."@en ; dct:license <https://www.spotify.com/legal/end-user-agreement/> .
Broad Interoperability for Diversity: From Archive To Spotify Our data model supports only “patterns” of important standard library, archive, museum, rights management conceptual models; functionality is not optimised for libraries but for cross-institutional use 1 2 3 Full description for curators, promoters, researchers •Using the familiar Wikipedia/Wikidata GUI Unrestricted access on legal streaming services for all •On Spotify & other platforms, educational, personal use without copying rights. Limited (non-commercial) access for research •Europeanan and the EU’s new Culture Cloud 1 2 3
Find Our Results OpenMusE | WP Presentation 20 Papers, presentations, datasets, social media Website: https://www.openmuse.eu/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openmusiceurope/ X: https://x.com/OpenMusicEurope Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/openmusiceurope/ Repository: https://zenodo.org/communities/music_observatory/
Thank you for your attention! OpenMusE | WP Presentation 21 Get in touch for replication advice, questions, comments Dániel Antal www.linkedin.com/in/antaldaniel Reprex reprex.nl/contact Tomáš Mikš https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom%C3%A1%C5%A1mik%C5%A1-a9137441/ SOZA https://www.soza.sk/page/contact