market-report | Digital Music Observatory

An Empirical Analysis of Music Streaming Revenues and Their Distribution

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:00:00 +0200

The research questions asked in this report are related to the Music Creator Earnings' Project (MCE), exploring issues concerning equitable remuneration and earnings distributions. We were tasked with providing a longitudinal analysis of earnings development and relating our findings to equitable remuneration. The starting point of our work was centred around a very broadly defined problem: how much money music creators (rightsholders) earn from streaming, how these earnings are distributed, and how the earnings and their distribution have developed during the last decade.

The highly globalized music industry generates two important international reports, as well as several national reports, but these are not suitable for the analysis of the typical or average rightsholder, nor for small labels and publishers who do not represent a large and internationally diversified portfolio of music works or recordings. Copyright and neighboring right revenues are collected in national jurisdictions. Because British artists are almost never constrained by their use of language, and the UK Music Industry is highly competitive in the global music markets, even relatively less known rightsholders earn revenues from dozens of national markets. The lack of market information on music sales volumes, prices for each jurisdiction, and the unaccounted for national, domestic, and foreign revenues makes the analysis of the rightholder’s earnings, or the economics of a certain distribution channel like music streaming or media platforms, impossible.

While total earnings are reported by international and national organizations, they hide five important economic variables: changes in sales volumes, changes in prices, market share on various national jurisdictions (which have their own volume and price movements), the exchange rates applied, and the share of the repertoire exploited. Even worse, the global music industry has no comprehensive database of rightsholders, music works, and recordings. Many rights are represented by heirs or passive investors. And because of the enormous number of works and recordings, in any given royalty payment period, most works/recordings are not used and not compensated. The lack of a known population and distribution makes usual indicators as average or median earnings arithmetically impossible to compute, and the large number of disused works and recordings makes even the estimation of the typical (median) value useless for economic analysis. The estimation of the arithmetic mean is equally problematic, because it is distorted by the earnings of very few global stars. To understand the streaming economy from the perspective of a typical or average rightsholder, or from the perspective of a small independent label or music publisher, requires very challenging sampling techniques either in surveying or in empirically observing and aggregating data from royalty accounts. National and international music organizations are not equipped with the data processing and statistical capacity to do so.

This is the problem that the Digital Music Observatory, a working demo of the European Music Observatory is solving. It grew out of the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Databases (CEEMID) initiative in 2014, in which righthsolders from three countries attempted to solve this problem. By 2019, CEEMID had collected information on 20 European markets, including the United Kingdom, and processed data on far more markets. The state51 music group, through its distribution arm, has been supporting the creation of the largest ever European market report, the Central European Market Report, and supported the creation of the CEEMID-CI indexes, which, for the first time provided a stock-index type of view from an individual rightsholder’s perspective on volume and price movements in the UK and in other countries. The state51 music group drew attention to the observatory approach and this work in the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) Select Committee of the British House of Commons. The MCE project first individually contacted the Digital Music Observatory (successor of CEEMID) and state51, and eventually with the permission of state51, the project commissioned this report, which re-uses the CEEMID-CI indexes. The MCE project also committed to share data in the Digital Music Observatory.

The first chapter is divided into three subchapters: 1.1 the theoretical problems imposed by copyright law and intellectual property valuation methods; 1.2 policy issues related to the copyright management problems that lead to large amounts of unpaid royalties and value transfer, as well as potential problems with AI distribution systems and royalty distribution rules; and 1.3 identifying and offering solutions for empirical problems in estimating the relevant earnings indicators for individual rightsholders.

The second chapter presents the CEEMID-CI indexes, and gives an explanation to the seemingly paradoxical situation of total market growth, and the feeling of individual righthsolders that their earnings remain flat or decreasing. We show in 2.1 that revenues that are flat or slightly growing are caused by growing volumes and falling prices (See 2.2 https://mce.dataobservatory.eu/empirical.html#streaming-volume; 2.3 CEEMID-CI Streaming Price Index.)

The third chapter, using computer simulations, gives a fuller picture. It shows that in the UK and many other markets, in the period of 2016-2019, the growth of streaming use hardly offset the diminishing price (value) of the streams. In many markets, rightsholders, expressed in British pounds, experienced flat earnings, which was by a large extent due to the benevolent USD/GBP, EUR/GBP, and CHF/GBP exchange rates. It is likely that the majority of individual rightsholders experienced flat or diminishing revenues, and later releases brought less and less revenue per a thousand streams. A less benevolent exchange rate environment could have brought very large losses of revenue (See 3.4 for more details.)

Our computer simulations show that British rightsholders are experiencing a rather varied picture of music streaming. Because of the generally falling value of streams, short-lived hits are more impacted by value decline than perennial hits (See subchapters 3.1 and 3.2.) Rightsholders with a diversified international audience are partly shielded by these effects (See 3.3.) Younger stars and new genres generally experience a windfall from the pro-rata distribution system and older artists with more conventional genres such as rock or blues are experiencing headwinds. The publicly available market totals are hiding completely different market experiences.

The MCE project and its stakeholders did not provide us with any data. Our detailed data from other jurisdictions, however, shows that music streaming has been successfully competing with other sales/distribution formats of music partly because it was much cheaper, and generally devalued music-related rights. This is particularly the case with media platforms like YouTube. For the UK, which is not planning to adopt new EU regulations, closing the value gap is an important policy task. We also show on the example of other countries that current policy debate in the UK around the re-definition of equitable remuneration rigths, or on the pro-rata or user-centrique distribution schemes, are gaining excessive focus, and changes in these aspects of the streaming ecosystem will solve the problems of few, if any, rightsholders. We believe that the music industry must look beyond the current practices of streaming pricing and distribution, for example, to telecommunication services, and investigate the adoption of a more just system.

Our report highlights some important lessons. First, we show that in the era of global music sales platforms it is impossible to understand the economics of music streaming without international data harmonization and advanced surveying and sampling. Paradoxically, without careful adjustments for accruals, market shares in jurisdictions, and disaggregation of price and volume changes, the British industry cannot analyze its own economics because of its high level of integration to the global music economy. Furthermore, the replacement of former public performances, mechanical licensing, and private copying remunerations (which has been available for British rightsholders in their European markets for decades) with less valuable streaming licenses has left many rightsholders poorer. Making adjustments on the distribution system without modifying the definition of equitable remuneration rights or the pro-rata distribution scheme of streaming platforms opens up many conflicts while solving not enough fundamental problems. Therefore, we suggest participation in international data harmonization and policy coordination to help regain the historical value of music.

Feasibility Study On Promoting Slovak Music In Slovakia & Abroad: Why are the total market shares of Slovak music relatively low both on the domestic and the foreign markets? How can we measure the market share of the Slovak music in the domestic and foreign markets? We offer some answers and solution based on empirical research and with the creation of a database and an AI application.
Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?: Our paper argues that fair competition in music streaming is restricted by the nature of the remuneration arrangements between creators and the streaming platforms, the role of playlists, and the strong negotiating power of the major labels. It concludes that urgent consideration should be given to a user-centric payment system, as well as greater transparency of the factors underpinning playlist creation and of negotiated agreements.
Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies: While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.
Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020: The results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.

Call for Open Collaboration

Do you need high-quality data for your music business or institution? Are you a music researcher? Join our open collaboration Digital Music Observatory team as a data curator, developer or business developer.

Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field?

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0100

Our article, Music Streaming: Is It a Level Playing Field? is published in the February 2021 issue of CPI Antitrust Chronicle, which is fully devoted to competition policy issues in the music industry.

The dramatic growth of music streaming over recent years is potentially very positive. Streaming provides consumers with low cost, easy access to a wide range of music, while it provides music creators with low cost, easy access to a potentially wide audience. But many creators are unhappy about the major streaming platforms. They consider that they act in an unfair way, create an unlevel playing field and threaten long-term creativity in the music industry.

Our paper describes and assesses the basis for one element of these concerns, competition between recordings on streaming platforms. We argue that fair competition is restricted by the nature of the remuneration arrangements between creators and the streaming platforms, the role of playlists, and the strong negotiating power of the major labels. It concludes that urgent consideration should be given to a user-centric payment system, as well as greater transparency of the factors underpinning playlist creation and of negotiated agreements.

You can read the entire issue and the full text of our article on Competition Policy International in pdf.

Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0100

Please give us ideas, comments to our pre-print manuscript, which is available on SSRN our for direct download here on Data & Lyrics.

In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition to acquire a leading role in the data economy. At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use. In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong. Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of EU creative and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence training systems, will most probably be lost. The problem has a worldwide dimension. While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.

The Welsh Music Industries In a Post-Covid World

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0100

In July 2020, Professor Paul Carr was commissioned by Senedd Research to document a report examining the ‘state of play’ in the post Covid-19 music industries in Wales. This resultant document outlines the contextual backstory of the emergence of private and public sector support for the music industries in Wales since the pandemic commenced; examines the advice given to the music industries by the UK and Welsh Governments concerning roadmaps out of the pandemic; reviews the industry and academic research that has emerged since the pandemic started and finally, compares Welsh Government support packages tonations in other parts of the world.

Although the report considers the Welsh music industries more broadly, its primary focus is on live music, as it is this which has been the recent concern of the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee. It is also this subsector that has been widely reported as being impacted the most by the pandemic. The report concludes by documenting a series of recommendations for the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee to consider presenting to Welsh Government.

In order to give the reader a concise snapshot of details contained in the report the Executive Summery outlines the context of the Welsh industries pre and post Covid-19, prior to contextualising its recommendations, which are sub divided into the following six categories: Reopening and Recovery Strategies; Research; Strategic Opportunities and Promotion; Policy; Education; Funding.

CCS Ecosystems: Evidence-Driven CCI Policy & The Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0100

CEEMID & Consolidated Independent presented and discussed with stakeholders the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on national and comparative evidence-based policymaking in the cultural and creative sector on the CCS Ecosystems: FLIPPING THE ODDS Conference – a two-day high-level stakeholder event jointly organized by Geothe-Institute and the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission with the Creative FLIP project.

Daniel’s presentation was focused around the question on invisibility of the CCI sector in the economic, education and labour policymaking, and the low level of data use in fact-based cultural policy design, and the following policy design problems. Our CEE Music Industry Report 2020 created with the help and support of Consolidated Independent was used as a use case for the problems.

This blog post is an edited version of Daniel’s presentation and the subsequent panel discussion with the stakeholders and organizers.

The CEE Report builds on the results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.

Invisibility

The measurement problems and the ‘invisibility’ of creative and cultural industries is a consequence of the fact that these industries are predominantly comprised of microenterprises and individual, freelancing entrepreneurs. Even larger entities, such as collective management organizations can be classified as small enterprises. In the EU, small- and medium enterprises, and especially microenterprises usually have reduced reporting duties to the statistical authorities and tax authorities (which is the most important secondary source of government statistics in anonymized, aggregated form.) This means that the supply side is not visible for policymakers. The recommendation is to conduct sample-based surveys among these microenterprises, but very few member states do that.

Another problem is that on the demand side, not all member states create statistics. ESSNet-Culture created recommendations how to measure cultural access and participation, which is a broader term than cultural consumption, as it includes non-market forms, for example, liturgical music, amateur acting, and so on. The European Commission sometimes makes excellent, but not detailed CAP surveys, which are the most important sources of Eurostat’s relevant pan-European statistics.

CEEMID has been making such surveys, both on the supply side (in music and film) and in the audience side (in music, film, theatre, opera, and artistic activities) in several member states, and has plenty of experience with using the EU-mandated CAP surveys of 2007 and 2013. The CEE report relies on the latter date set in first part of the audience analysis. Our work was already presented in 2015 as a best use case in Creating better national cultural statistics with Eurobarometer datasets and ESSNet-Culture technical recommendations at GESIS, which maintains the Eurobarometer archives, on the Eurobarometer Symposium Four Decades of Surveying Europe – Perspectives on Academic Research with the European Commission’s Eurobarometer Surveys

For the EU the lowest hanging fruit would be to critically assess the past surveys, including the partial CAP survey made in 2017 for the cultural heritage part of culture, and the national surveys conducted by CEEMID and its partners, and to mandate an annual or biannual CAP survey within the Eurobarometer series, probably as a specially sampled “Special Eurobarometer”. This would very significantly reduce the costs compared to a country-to-country basis, and probably could be shared by other institutions, for example, with the European Audiovisual Observatory. This alone would greatly increase the demand / consumption side information on the services of creative and cultural enterprises.

In the panel discussion Consolidated Independent highlighted the problem of leaving sample-based statistics making to the industry itself, which leads to myopical incentives to create ‘policy-based evidence’ that is cherry picked by industry trade associations to fit their often not very well thought out policy agenda. In our view, the most important role of a future European Music Observatory would be to set standards to data collection and integration. The music industry is one of the most data-rich industries globally, but the publicly available, verified, trustworthy information is scarce both for policy-making and for business planning among microenterprises who have know specialized research know-how. Our already existing, representative national surveys should and could be extended to the whole Europe with the quality control and visibility offered by such an Observatory.

Industry organization

A very significant challenge with evidence-based policymaking, or, in fact, with any policy making is that the extremely fragmented nature of the industry makes national and EU-level consultations very difficult. Most of the workforce is neither a classical employer nor employee but works as a freelancer or a micro-entrepreneur. Their views are very rarely represented by trade unions or employee associations or chambers of commerce. Despite all efforts on EU level to make the social dialogue more representative for atypical and flexible work forms, the problems and the views of the creative and cultural sectors are largely unrepresented in policy debate.

A prime example of this problem is the very heavy over-taxation of the music industry that we have shown in the Hungarian and Slovak national music industry reports, and in other documents in Croatia. The problem is not only characteristic for the music industry, but generally all CCIs because they share similar economic properties: no real chance to use tax breaks, high level of labour input and high level of value added. While policy makers and granting authorities spend much time on trying to improve the financing of this sector, in fact, reducing over-taxation would make a much more imminent impact on the liquidity, profitability and growth opportunities of the sector.

However, in the making of economic and tax policies, the fragmented creative and cultural industries hardly can represent their special situation.

Policy issues

Apart from taxation issues, which significantly reduce the liquidity, profitability and growth opportunities of these sectors in many EU countries, particularly in the CEE, where corporate taxes are low but value-added taxes are high, there are other important policy problem that reduce the long-term growth capacity of the sector.

The very small enterprise size leads to missing strategic human resources (HR) and research and development (R&D) functions in almost all enterprises – including simple market research activities. Companies with 1-2 employees do not have specialized management and support functions, and thus they have a very strong handicap in HR and R&D.

A good example of this problem is the motion picture and TV industry. These industries were comprised of medium-sized enterprises in the 1980s with significant in-house education functions. The current structure of these industries, however, resembles music, with almost all enterprises staying below the 5-person threshold. In our experience, based on development needs assessments in the Hungarian motion picture and the Czech music industry, this creates an acute skills and labor shortage. Missing skills cannot be well replaced by recruitment, or with strategic HR development via life-long learning.

Similarly to very reduced opportunities to participate in, and create life-long learning schemes, there are very little chances to engage in market research and R&D. While the music industry, for example, is one of the most data-driven industries in the world, the microenterprise size does not allow that these enterprises commission market research or hire data scientists. This leads to very asymmetrical relationships with the main distributors of music and media content on platforms that are owned by global data companies.

Recommendations

Daniel made a few concrete recommendations in the panel.

Creating the European Music Observatory, and the creation of similar industry initiatives, and commissioning collaborative (multi-stakeholder) market research, as CEEMID works in many countries, can only replace the missing market research function in the extremely fragmented industries, such as motion picture production, the music industry, but to a certain degree architecture and design.
A low-hanging fruit would be a critical assessment of the previous Pan-European CAP surveys and the comparable national CAP surveys conducted by CEEMID and its partners following the ESSNet Culture recommendations and the inclusion of the CAP surveys in an annual or bi-annual form in the Eurobarometer (Special) series. A Special Eurobarometer may be more suitable because usually a non-proportional weighting of the sample gives the best value for money in these surveys.
Critically reviewing the participation of micro-enterprises in the current forms of social dialogue and looking for formal or informal ways to increase participation in policy making can gradually lead to more creative-friendly economic regulation and tax policies. The Hungarian Music Industry Report 2015 and the Slovak Music Industry Report 2019 contains very interesting case studies for this problem that we briefly summarize in the CEE Music Industry Report 2020.
Critically reviewing the few examples from mainly Nordic member states where collective agreements and other collaborative institutions allow microenterprises and freelancers to participate in life-long learning problems can help designing policies that will gradually reduce the huge skill gap of the CCIs in management know-how, data know-how, or renew their technical skills necessary in the production of their services and content. Our work with the Hungarian National Film Fund and surveys among more than a thousand film makers can give much insight into this problem.

Further links

Our research findings were earlier presented and discussed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Bratislava with stakeholders.

You can follow Creative FLIP project on Twitter.

Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0100

The predecessor of Reprex’s Demo Music Observatory, CEEMID together with the independent music distributor Consolidated Independent presented and discussed with stakeholders the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on national and comparative evidence-based policymaking in the cultural and creative sector on the CCS Ecosystems: FLIPPING THE ODDS Conference – a two-day high-level stakeholder event jointly organized by Geothe-Institute and the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission with the Creative FLIP project.

Our research findings were earlier presented and discussed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Bratislava with stakeholders.

You can find the earlier presentations in the blog section of the website.

Executive Summary

The first Central European Music Industry Report is the result of a co-operation that started among stakeholders in three EU countries five years ago to measure the economic value added of music – the basis of a modern royalty pricing system. This gave birth to CEEMID, originally the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Databases, a data integration programme that now in 2020, covers all of Europe. CEEMID fulfils similar roles to the planned European Music Observatory and supports all pillars of the future pan-European system.

The comparison of Western and Eastern music audiences reveals key demographic differences that make the unchanged adoption of business practices from mature markets in the region questionable. Chapter 2 of this report will show these differences and their consequences on music markets, in terms of visiting and acquisition likelihood, frequency, seasonality and purchasing capacity. This is an example of how CEEMID fulfils the role of Pillar 3 (music, society and citizenship) in the planned European Music Observatory.

Chapter 3 contrasts market demand with the supply strategies of musicians. CEEMID has been surveying music professionals, including artists, technicians and managers about their working conditions, market conditions and plans for five years across a growing number of countries. In 2019 we invited 100 national and regional stakeholders to distribute our surveys. In some countries, our surveys already have several years of historic data, making the resulting musician database probably the largest ever source of data about how music is produced and how musicians live. We are constantly looking for partners to roll out this survey to new countries in new languages.

The CEE region has comparative advantages in big music events like festivals, and it has become one of the most important hubs for cultural tourism in the world. We explain this phenomenon in Chapter 4 by showing the differences in demand composition, demography and supply of venues in the second chapter. The lack of a modern and dense network of permanent music venues gave rise to magnificent music festivals in the CEE. Open’er, Sziget and Exit are among the biggest and best festivals in the world, closely followed by several smaller festivals in all countries. The share of festivals in the live music market is many times higher than in Western Europe and they provide vital export revenues to the local music economies. However, they play a limited role in finding new audiences for local artists, as they are increasingly programming for Western audiences by providing shows of international hits. They can only very partially fill in the gaps left by the small venue problem that hit the emerging markets harder than the UK or Australia, where policy action had been already taken to reverse the decline of the availability of smaller live music venues.

On the recording side, our analysis shows that modern digital services are growing at a faster rate than in mature markets. Because of lower repertoire competition, streaming quantities are similar for a typical Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovak track than in the mature markets. However, revenue growth is limited because of the interplay of several analysed factors. Our analysis of the live and recorded music markets shows that CEEMID fulfils the roles of the Pillar 1 (music economy) of the planned European Music Observatory.

Most recorded music sales revenue in the region comes from streaming platforms, just like in the mature markets. Successful sales strategies require a solid knowledge of the global marketplace and the ability to understand and train sales algorithms. Micro-enterprises, such as independent labels, have very limited ability to cope with these functions, given that they do not have market research or R&D functions. CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have started initiating open, national R&D consortia to create the necessary concentration in data assets, analytical capacity and budgets to close this gap. As a first step, CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have created a large, independent music dataset based on hundreds of millions of royalty statement entries to create our market indexes, styled after stock market and bond market indexes. Streaming opportunities are fast changing as roll-out of streaming services is happening at a different rate in various territories; subscription charges and the exchange rate to the producer’s currency vary and repertoire competition emerges in the market. Our volume and revenue indexes in Chapter 5.3 are aimed at creating sales algorithms that optimize sales volumes and expected revenues. We believe that this analysis also reveals that CEEMID partially fulfils the roles of Pillar 2 (music diversity and circulation) and feeds important data into Pillar 4 (innovation).

The region has far bigger untapped potential than most music business executives believe. Households in the region spend a significantly lower share of their recreational budget on music than their Western, Southern or Nordic peers. The region has a lot of untapped cultural purchasing power because servicing is particularly challenging in both the live and recorded sides of the business.

This upside potential cannot be tapped without better pricing. Royalty levels are often very low in the region. Due to many combined effects analysed in this short report, the gap between royalties earned in the CEE and Western Europe is several times bigger than the difference in GDP or national average wage. These gaps are partly caused by special interests preventing collective management from charging appropriate tariffs for restaurants, media companies or electronic appliance importers and manufacturers, and partly by unfavourable taxation of cultural products and services.

CEEMID was designed to create economic evidence on royalty pricing, private copying compensation and the creation of economic value added in the industry. In the first Hungarian Music Industry Report of ProArt and in the first Slovak Music Industry Report we have shown that economic and taxation policies of the CEE countries aimed to support car and electronics manufacturing create a distorted, unfavourable economic regime for creative industries. We want to help local stakeholders with economic evidence to correct these discriminatory policies during the overhaul of the EU VAT system. We have been helping various national organizations with economic evidence, presented in the light of latest EU jurisprudence, to improve their pricing activities. Our thousands of indicators were also used in ex ante evaluations of granting schemes.

In 2020, all EU member states will change their copyright administration legislation because of the national implementations of the 2019/790 Digital Single Market directive. CEEMID provides evidence in several countries about the size and impact mechanism of the value transfer, and generally the widespread use of the copyright exemption for private copying. We believe that the thousands of pan-European music industry indicators that we have aggregated over the five years will play a vital role in these regulatory processes.

CEEMID fulfils its roles with a very thorough exploitation of the EU’s 17-years-old Open Data regime with the re-use of public sector information, and a very careful mapping of the music industry. These maps help us conduct annual surveys among musicians and the audience, and they help us connect (always with pre-approval and with a user mandate) to industry databases. We do not only cover the EU countries, but increasingly (potential) candidate countries and neighbourhood countries.

In our vision, this data collection and integration, i.e. Pillars 1-3 should be available for all music stakeholders, should remain public and publicly funded. The last Pillar of the observatory, innovation, is where private entities should compete. The founders of CEEMID and Consolidated Independent believe that this report demonstrates the business and policy benefits of such a system with the analysis of the Central & Eastern European music markets. We believe that this way CEEMID is in a position to serve most of the planned functions of the envisioned European Music Observatory, and we are looking for ways to make either our thousands of indicators, or our data collection and integration software open source and available for all stakeholders in the EU and its neighbours. CEEMID was born out of necessity to level out the different levels of public research and statistical coverage of the EU member states. In our view, private entities in the future should focus their investments in Pillar 4 of the planned observatory, i.e. competing in innovation with creating new models, algorithms and services based on data that is available throughout the European Union without giving further advantage to the already mature markets.

Czech Music Development Program & Comparative Market Research

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 11:00:00 +0100

I was presenting some highlights from the work we started with in the organization of SoundCzech with 25 music professionals representing more than 20 stakeholders in the How We Would Like To Work in the Czech Music Industry in 2020 ex ante evaluation workshop in the context of the comparative Central European Music Industry Report.

You can find the full presentation, including slides not shown in the workshop here. The presentation is a self-contained big file of 20Mb, takes time to load.

The work is done in a collaborative manner with the open Research Consortium started by SoundCzech, CEEMID & Consolidated Independent. We would like to invite any Czech stakeholders, or even individuals to join our efforts. Because in the music sector, all organization are microenterprise or small enterprise sized, they usually have no significant market research, innovation and strategic HR management capacities. We hope to give them in each country useful tools.

A very interesting part of the discussion in the morning was around transparency and potential conflict between stronger and weaker markets. Thank you for all colleagues who came on a Saturday morning after great showcase concerts the night before, and let’s stay in touch!

Private Copying in Croatia

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 12:00:00 +0100

Press release: Studija: Naknade za privatno kopiranje (BTL) u Hrvatskoj drastično ispod prosjeka EU

Short summary in Croatian: Privatno kopiranje u Hrvatskoj Full text in English: Private Copying in Croatia

Slovak Music Industry Report

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100

The whole report can be downloaded for free from the homepage of SOZA.

Press reports in Slovak:

SME: [SOZA predstavila prvú Správu o slovenskom hudobnom priemysle](Čítajte viac: https://domov.sme.sk/c/22084685/soza-predstavila-historicky-prvu-spravu-o-slovenskom-hudobnom-priemysle.html)

Kreatívna Europa: Historicky prvá Správa o slovenskom hudobnom priemysle prináša okrem analýz aj odporúčania pre budúcnosť

In Hungarian: Új Szó: Tudományosan a hazai zeneiparról

Slides

Spáva o hudobnom priemysle na Slovensku from Dániel Antal

Slovak Music Industry Report

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 19:00:00 +0200

You can review the slides here.

or on Slideshare.

The Slovak Music Industy Report can be downloaded from here.

CEEMP Session: Licensing, How To Tackle The Value Gap And A Discussion on Licensing Initiatives

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0200

CEEMID had the honor to participate in the third panel of CEEMP in Warsaw together with Ben McEwen from ICE; Jules Parker from Spotify and Dominic Houston from Netflix, and Chris Butler from Music Sales, who is also the chairperson of ICMP. Our panel was moderated by Nigel Elderton from peermusic, who is also the new chairperson of PRS in the UK.

Jules from Spotify spoke about their new initiative, Spotify for Publishers. Spotify pays out about 20% of its royalties to publishers. Because the labels are the bigger stakeholders, they often do not provide the necessary information for work identification in the case of publishers.

Dominic from Netflix is already one of the biggest buyers of music, and I believe that his company’s footprint will just continue growing. His time buys licenses only 10% of their music from publishers. They mainly use original film music, and to a significant degree, catalogs.

Ben made a presentation about their innovation efforts at ICE digital rights management. Working with some of the largest repertoires represented by PRS, GEMA and STIM, they really offer world class services. Next year they promise to scale services to smaller repertoires, who can immediately benefit from low-cost identification from the cleaned data of these large societies.

Digital gap between household cultural spending and CE / S European music industry revenues in the digital world Comparing household cultural spending with digital music revenues in Europe’s main regions.

Daniel’s short presentation highlighted the fact that the CEE region’s is much richer in terms of household cultural and recreational spending that it is thought by the music industry, because the music industry is really lagging its Western and Nordic peers in tapping into this pool of money. There are many reasons for this, all a bit touched upon the other speaker’s issues, and their implementation difficulties n the CEE region, especially different revenue stream breakup, strong collective management and relatively underdeveloped publishing. The region is about 200% or more below its benchmark in the sales we were talking about in this session. The conversation will continue in Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Bratislava and Warsaw in the coming weeks.

Hungarian Music Industry Report

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0200

A ProArt zeneipari jelentése from Dániel Antal

Investigating the Live Music Industry in Wales: A Critical Analysis

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:00:00 +0200

This report is the result of a grant application awarded by The Welsh Music Foundation, who were given the money by The Welsh Assembly Government. Its purpose was to investigate pertinent issues of the live music industry that resonate within Wales. Research methodology included the implementation of an online questionnaire targeted toward the Welsh music industry, closely followed by a range of face to face interviews with key industry personnel. The key findings were then taken to a number of forum meetings in the south, west and north of the country, where the industry at large were given the opportunity to discuss preliminary issues. Themes highlighted at the start of the research included: inward investment, training provision needs, examples of best practice, sales and marketing issues, Welsh language issues.

As a means of summarising the current position of the Welsh live music industry, a SWOT Analysis of the report can be outlined as follows.

Strengths

Wales has successfully produced many internationally acclaimed artists over a number of decades.
The country already has a small number of excellent venues in various parts of the country.
There are already a range of good infrastructural and business support mechanisms in place.
Many Welsh artists have a strong national identity which assist the publicity of the nation to the world.

Weaknesses

Wales as a whole has a limited array of specialist music venues, in particular outside of the South.
There is a perceived lack of infrastructure to assist the promotion of popular music activity throughout the country.
As outlined in by Owen and Rhisiart (2010), areas surrounding the exploitation and retention of copyrighted works within Wales is problematic.
There is a tendency for too many skilled workers being „imported‟ from England.
Unlike many other small nations, there has been no fully funded mapping exercise of the Welsh music industry.
Wales tends to be regarded as a „region" of the UK as opposed to a nation in its own right.

Opportunities

The development of similar Music Festivals to SWN, Green Man and Wakestock by working with organisations such as Welsh Assembly Government’s new Major Events Unit and the Arts Council of Wales’s new Festival Fund.
The new Cerdd Cymru (Music Wales) partnership is a chance to align partners, in addition to consolidating many of the recommendations in this report, especially with international projects.
The construction of an organisation similar to DF Concerts in Scotland (with WAG support) to ensure industry skills are nurtured, finance stays in Wales, and career aspirations are realised.
To ensure that more people take on the challenge of live music promotion.
For government to encourage more research and post graduate study into the Welsh music industry.
To explore the means through which it is possible to empower musicians and live music enterprises to take advantage of the „micro loans‟ outlined in the Hargreaves Report (2010) recommendations.
To develop a (potentially accredited) music promotion programme that teaches the necessary skill bases to promote music throughout Wales.
To explore the ways in which technologies such as Wolfgangs Vault and promotional tools such as Songkick, Band Metrics, Music Glue and My Band can be used to monetize live music within Wales.
To develop alternative funding models for promoting music in Wales, such as the profit share scheme being developed by The Absurd Festival.
To nurture future live music audiences by encouraging alcohol free venues for young people.
There is a large media base in Wales, and if more welsh music was used, has the potential to positively impact the live sector.

Threats

Various parts of Wales suffer from close proximity to English towns such as Bristol, London and Liverpool.
Many participants in the Welsh industry give the impression that they reach a plateau in their career, after which they either change career or move out of Wales.
The variance in local council infrastructures that encourage „night time economies'.
The practice of buying in technical skills for some music festivals.
The shortfall in technical skills forecast by Creative and Cultural Skills (CCS).
Depending on the local council and size of the band – the 2003 Licensing Act.
Too much competition in small venues in Cardiff.
Poor transport infrastructure in some parts of Wales.

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Investigating the Live Music Industry in Wales: A Critical Analysis

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats