Proposed thematic issue of "Music and Data" journal: "Interventions in the datafication of music in Europe"

This proposal outlines a thematic issue of Music and Data entitled Interventions in the datafication of music in Europe. Its articles are themselves interventions insofar as they introduce not just new music data, but novel methods of data collection and analysis that are reproducible by design. The articles synthesise the research conducted by four recent projects: Fair Muse, Music360, and OpenMusE, funded in the European Commission research cluster “Towards a competitive, fair and sustainable European music ecosystem”, and the Live Music Mapping Project, which shares their European scope, policy orientation, and commitment to data transparency. While currently applied in Europe, the methods described could be transferred to any contemporary music ecosystem to fill critical gaps in the available data on their actors and interactions. Based on their findings, the articles also advocate for interventions in music data governance: i.e., multi-level decision-making processes about how music data are generated, collected, and shared. The thematic issue’s aim is to nudge the ongoing and inevitable datafication of music toward greater representational, distributive, and procedural justice.