CCSI Data Observatory

Pan-European Creator Survey

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 14:00:00 +0100

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

The Cultural Creative Sectors Industries CCSI Data Observatory has grew out of the Digital Music Observatory, which had harmonized and collected surveys in all European countries about how musicians work and earn their living, and how audiences differ in various countries, metropolitan regions in terms of typical age, visiting probability, spending capacity, and other important factors. We helped music organizations to significantly increase the royalty pay-outs of artists in two countries, and we contributed for the advocacy of fairer compensation and fairer taxation in others.

This year we teamed up with the reCreating Europe research consortium of renowned experts in the field of copyright, geography and economics of creativity, sociology of innovation, communication and media studies, cultural policies, Open Knowledge and access to culture, cultural policies, minority rights and disability rights. We are carrying out a truly pan-European survey in all EU languages about important topics for creators and performers, including but not limited to musicians, songwriters, composers, photographers, video artists, designers, actors, illustrators, authors, directors, journalists and screenwriters:

Understanding how much creators are aware of the legal and financial terms that online platforms use that distribute their work
Understanding and interest in how AI algorithms contribute to the successful or not successful dissemination of their work, or can support their creative processes
Understanding and evaluation of fairness in the way internet platforms distribute earnings to creators
Attitudes to plagiarism, piracy, and copyright protection
Access to Covid-19 relief funds
No personal data is involved.

What do we ask from individual creators, bands, collectives?

The researchers of the reCreating Europe Consortium would like to carry out an interview with you in English.
If you cannot or do not want to be interviewed in English, we would be grateful if you would still fill out the survey form (about 10 minutes) in any of the EU official languages,
And invite a colleague/friend confident in English to do the same and volunteer for the interview at the end of the survey.

Creator organizations

We would like to ask you to ask your members to do the same above, in your newsletter, Facebook page, or other means of communication. The research with free datasets, visualizations, infographics will be placed for free in the Digital Music Observatory and the Cultural and Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory and can help your own HR, advocacy, education work. (We have many other similar data assets that are already there, or we can give to you.) Therefore, it is fully compliant with GDPR—we do not want to know who fills out our survey, the interviews are voluntary, and sharing the survey can contribute to your core business.

Bloggers

We would be very happy if you would write about this survey or invite creators to participate in our research. We can give you infographics, data visualizations prior to academic publication to write about the results.

In our Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on evidence-based policymaking we compared how musicians and their audiences live in several countries.

Our research principles

We believe in transparency, openness, and high-quality work. We carry out an open collaboration with representatives of music professionals, NGOs, and universities. Because in the European music ecosystem, most professional and artists are freelancers or micro-entrepreneurs, we also try to form collaborations with individuals. All our data is open, interoperable, reusable data that comes with the highest quality of documentation and help for reuse.

We would appreciate it immensely if you would support this important research by disseminating the call to participate in this study.

History

Before you start a new questionnaire-based research, get in touch with us! Maybe we have history for your questionnaires. We can make your survey cheaper, better, and more informative.

The Digital Music Observatory and its predecessor, CEEMID, has been working with harmonized surveys for 8 years. We have compiled the biggest database of interview transcripts with concert audiences (more than 70,000 interviews in all European countries, soon to be extended to more than 100k) and the world’s biggest harmonized survey dataset about music creators (4000 responses from 12 European countries.) We use the Open Data Directive, originally for government-funded research data, recently extended to taxpayer funded scientific research, to access datasets that are invisible for the music industry.

We using survey harmonization and data integration techniques to join hundreds of questionnaire-based research in Europe on music audiences. We are now improving our capacities to bring analysis to sub-national level, like in the example of Wales.

What is Survey Harmonization?

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:00:00 +0100

In our Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on evidence-based policymaking we compared how musicians and their audiences live in several countries.

Engage with us on LinkedIn @CultDataObs or check out our open data and open repositories, code, tutorials

Survey harmonization is a powerful research tool to increase the usability of questionnaire-based empirical research. When the same questions are asked from similarly selected German and French people, music audiences and musicians, then we can make meaningful comparisons between the public opinions of the two countries, or the different perceptions of fans and makers of music. And if we repeat this procedure time after time, we can see if opinion is shifting more in Germany or France, or the living conditions of musicians are catching up with the rest of the country population.

You can create better surveys with less cost: you only need to ask the information, or change of information, that is not included in our harmonized datasets. Shorter, better questionnaires, smaller samples sizes, huge cost savings.
When you make questionnaire-based research, you immediately get a history (the same question asked years ago) and an international comparison (the same question asked in other countries.)
Often you do not even have to pay for the survey, because somebody else has already made a similar taxpayer funded research and we can just get the data for you. Harmonizing surveys requires advanced data science and statistics knowledge, which is what we provide with the scientific partners of the Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory. We have developed an open-source software, free to use, for this purpose. It is not for the faint heart – but users of our observatory can just leave their data for us and let us run the code.

How can you join this year’s survey?

Since 2020, a consortium of nine European universities led by Sant’Anna Pisa is working on the research project reCreating Europe funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. reCreating Europe aims at bringing a ground-breaking contribution to the understanding and management of copyright in the DSM, and at advancing the discussion on how IPRs can be best regulated to facilitate access to, consumption of and generation of cultural and creative products.

As a part of this project, the University of Amsterdam is conducting a survey which targets a wide range of creators and performers, including but not limited to musicians, songwriters, composers, photographers, video artists, designers, actors, illustrators, authors, directors, journalists and screenwriters.

Tpoics covered in the survey: (1) overall experiences with digitization of cultural content; (2) experiences with publishers, platforms and aggregators: contract and market power issues, accessibility, role of algorithms; (3) experiences with reversion clauses in copyright contracts (4) content removal and website blocking, role of algorithms in this; (5) income development over past years: total income, income from creative profession and distribution of sources within profession; impact of Covid and Covid-related support schemes (6) experiences with piracy and plagiarism; (7) competition from AI producing content.

The survey is available in all official EU languages.

We would appreciate it immensely if you would support this important research by disseminating the call to participate in this study.

History

Before you start a new questionnaire-based research, get in touch with us! Maybe we have history for your questionnaires. We can make your survey cheaper, better, and more informative.

Recreo Consortium

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 16:00:00 +0000

The Scuola Superiore di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant’Anna and Università degli Studi di Trento (Italy); University of Glasgow (United Kingdom); Universiteit van Amsterdam and Stichting Europeana from the Netherlands; the National University of Ireland Maynooth (Ireland); Tartu Ulikool (Estonia); Szegedi Tudományegyetem (Hungary); Fundacion Santa Maria La Real del Patrimonio Historico from Spain; the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium); Culture Action Europe AISBL and IDEA Strategische Economische Consulting (Belgium) and Reprex created the REshaping CCSI REsearch: Open data, policy analysis and methods for evidence-based decision-making consortium consortium, which will mainly develop new policy evidence in the field of innovation and inclusiveness for the creative and cultural sectors, industries. The Consortium applies for a Horizon Europe grant with the HORIZON-CL2-2021-HERITAGE-01-03 Cultural and creative industries as a driver of innovation and competitiveness call of the European Commission.

Policymakers face challenges when trying to implement a strict evidence-based approach to decision-making in the field of cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI). This is mostly due to four phenomena:

Evidence dissonances in mapping, measuring and analysis of key indicators, which lead to improper generalizations and gaps in decisionmakers’ knowledge and stakeholders’ awareness
Fragmentation of hubs of production and concentration of platforms, which create statistical biases and have features that hardly fit with traditional impact assessment methods;
Datafication, which is revolutionizing CCSI but remains difficult to investigate, thus broadening knowledge gaps; and
Stakeholders’ fragmentation and conflicting interests, which hinders their engagement, awareness-raising and uptake of policy inputs.With its cross-disciplinary consortium of academics, practitioners and a strong network of stakeholders, engaged via participatory research strategies, RECREO will help policymakers and stakeholders tackling such challenges, by generating new knowledge and methods to fill in knowledge and awareness gaps. RECREO will achieve this goal through four actions.

First, it will generate a wide array of horizontal and sector-specific datasets, made openly accessible via the CCSI Data Observatory and the Evidence Synthesis Platform. Second, it will offer an unprecedented EU and comparative mapping and impact assessment of key regulatory and policy measures relevant for CCSI, made available on the Law and Policy Observatory. Third, it will develop innovative methods to measure and assess CCSI innovation, competitiveness and spill-over effects, emphasizing inclusiveness, diversity and sustainability. Last, it will offer policy recommendations and best practices aimed at supporting the sustainable growth and competitiveness of culturally diverse CCSI, and their cross-fertilization with cultural heritage promotion and preservation.