A 360 DEGREES PERSPECTIVE ON THE VALUE OF MUSIC

Background music played in shops, bars, restaurants and other venues contributes to their revenue, increases the well-being of customers, and is an important source of revenue intellectual property rights (IPR) holders of the music. Yet, stakeholders have insufficient insight into the use of background music. Venues lack information about the value of music, collective management Organizations (CMOs) lack information for accurate royalty distribution, creators lack information about the usage of their music and policy makers are in the dark about the social and economic value of music. Our goal is to create a digital platform that collects data about the value of music played in venues for different stakeholders. The Platform collects data at a fine-grained level using fingerprinting technology and combines this with data held by CMOs to make this transparently available to stakeholders in the EU music ecosystem, including, creators, venues and policy makers. With this data, creators will understand the value of music and be able to identify new business opportunities. Venues will be able to assess the value of music for their revenue. Policy makers gain insight into the impact of events in the music ecosystem so that responses to disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic can be based on data.The consortium consists of five CMOs, two universities, a fingerprinting company, a European lobby company for artists, and a company on ecosystem design. Jointly, their customers cover all relevant stakeholders in the EU music ecosystem. The universities will develop a theory of music value based on real-world experiments with the CMOs and their customers. They will design a distributed architecture for secure collecting and sharing of data together with the fingerprinting company. We develop the Platform in two iterations of 18 months each. We will also design a business model and governance structure for further development and use of the Dashboard after the project completes.