Executive Summary
Our ambition with the development of the Open Music Observatory is to provide the technological basis and a practical roadmap for creating a European Music Observatory in a bottom-up, decentralised way. Instead of waiting for a grand, central agreement on what should a European music observatory be collecting and who should control it, we suggest a pragmatic approach: allow any data owners and data collectors who satisfy certain quality and cooperation rules to add their data to the Open Music Observatory; when it reaches a sufficient maturity for use in Europe, then decide if its maintenance requires a new institutional form or not.
In line with the European Commission’s Culture Compass for Europe, we argue that Europe’s cultural data future must be built on shared, interoperable infrastructures. At the same time, this experience demonstrates that certain cultural domains — notably music — require specialised, federated implementation layers due to the density of rights, frequency of reuse, and exposure to algorithmic systems. Music therefore provides a strategically valuable reference case for implementing the Culture Compass’s data and AI ambitions in practice.
Creating the Open Music Observatory was a cornerstone task of the OpenMusE project until the end of 2025, focusing on the collection, processing, and dissemination of data as well as the development of innovative data services in line with our exploitation pathways. This report is an accompanying document for the creation of the Open Music Observatory as a digital infrastructure on the web. In practice, the Observatory can be understood as a domain-specific implementation of a copyright and cultural data infrastructure for the European music ecosystem, and as the technological foundation for a future European Music Observatory as an institution.
This document was presented as a planning document in 2023. It has been partly updated till 11 December 2025. Some text is still reflecting the planning phase. You can access all versions on https://zenodo.org/records/16539570. You can check out the observatory before uploading all pillars on https://openmusicobservatory.eu/ and read our Open Music blog on https://openmusic.substack.com/
In the OpenMusE project, the development of the Open Music Observatory is coupled with a clear contractual expectation: the project must populate the Observatory’s four thematic pillars—Music Economy, Music Diversity, Music, Society & Sustainability, and Innovation & Future Trends —with initial, well-documented data and knowledge. This population process follows the project’s data-to-policy pipeline (see 1 Introduction): each work package defines its indicators, establishes data governance and legal bases, collects or accesses relevant administrative, survey, statistical, and platform data, processes and harmonises them through WP4 tools, and finally activates them in reproducible analytical workflows in WP5. The result is that the Observatory is not only a technical prototype but a functional, data-bearing infrastructure: the first integrated demonstration of how Europe’s music data can be curated, linked, analysed, and made reusable across public, private, and civic actors.
The Open Music Observatory is a digital service provider for the music industry that follows the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition of digital services, combined with a distinctive governance model. These services are implemented as interoperable data workflows supporting registration, identification, metadata coordination, evidence production, and knowledge dissemination across the music sector—in other words, functioning as copyright infrastructure services. The governance model and the digital service infrastructure represent a unique innovation that considers many good examples from the European Union and other industries.
An observatory has traditionally been a permanent location for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. In the past 30 years, it has also been used for long-term digital data collection programs for markets, social sciences, and humanities. This milestone marks the start of this observatory after a lengthy and intensive planning and prototyping phase. It can be seen as a modern reimagination of the data observatory model, or the observatory 2.0. Unlike traditional observatories that primarily collect and publish statistics, the Open Music Observatory operates as a federated data infrastructure that coordinates data flows between institutions and helps them remain informed through more timely, detailed, and accurate statistics. We created a new observatory model that fully aligns with the European Interoperability Framework but extends the governance of the digital services beyond public bodies, and allows the creation of a public-private partnership to manage the observatory.
The European Interoperability Framework aims to create a four-layered approach to build digital research, marketing, rights management, collection management services for the sector. These layers are introduced in separate chapters of this documentation.
The technological alignment is introduced in 4 Architecture; we decided to choose the technology of the world’s largest open knowledge graph, Wikidata, which already coordinates countless digital services in Europe’s cultural sector, and provides training and guardrails for many AI applications.
The semantic alignment is introduced in 5 Data coordination. This chapter focuses on the semantic and organisational aspects of interoperability.
The organisational alignment means bridging actual data-driven and computer supported workflows with data semantics (what does a song’s title mean for a librarian, an ethnomusicologist, a collective rights management agency), and how they can work with various translated, alternative, historical, mistyped, and preferred titles in distributing royalties, loaning printed sheets, describing musical traditions.
The legal alignment creates a policy that lays out the rights, prohibitions and necessary permission processes to connect and use the data together. We give a concrete example in Future-Proofing.
We were informed and influenced by the creation of Europeana (which started out from a similar collaborative project, a cultural heritage oriented data sharing space) and the Commission’s new plans to extend their digital services into the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH).
We aimed to achieve full interoperability with Europeana, and Reprex successfully submitted pilot data and concluded a Data Exchange Agreement. We also pursued interoperability with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), which at the time had only published the first version of its Heritage Digital Twin conceptual model and ontology; we were among the first teams to test these models with music data.
At the same time, the Open Music Observatory introduces an additional element to this ecosystem. While initiatives such as Europeana primarily aggregate the work of public-sector memory institutions, we are developing a governance model that enables structured cooperation between the public cultural sector and the private music ecosystem.
By the end of 2025, we aimed to create an “observatory 3.0”, that already hosts many intelligent data improvement technologies and fuels innovative applications/services in line with our project’s exploitation pathways. These services are at different maturity levels, but they could not be brought to a testable MVP without building out the minimal digital infrastructure and governance model at this milestone.
This document is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 LEGAL CODE Attribution 4.0 International license. You must refer to the document with the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.11385044.
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