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OpenMusE Pilot Studies Shed Light on the Economic Value of European Music

Measuring economic value within territories should be straightforward. Take commodities: count what you extract, multiply by market price, done. Manufacturing requires more steps—raw materials, labour, assembly, distribution—but the accounting remains straightforward. The value added at each stage is observable, traceable, and comparable across countries.

Music valuation operates under different rules.

 

The Digital Conundrum

Consider these complications: A French artist releases a song on a multinational platform, which gets streamed in Germany by an American listener with a bundled account paid for in USD. The platform pays a fraction of a cent per stream, but that rate varies by subscription tier, market, and attributes of the artist, the stream itself, etc. The rights payment splits between the songwriter, performer, record label, and publisher—each governed by different contracts and collecting societies. Meanwhile, the same song plays in an Italian café, generating different royalties through different channels under different national frameworks.

Now try to calculate: how much economic value did that French song add to the French economy?

This isn’t theoretical complexity. It’s the daily reality of music valuation in the digital era. Zero-price offerings, bundled subscriptions, cross-border platforms, multiple rights holders, and fragmented data sources transform what looks like a simple question—”what’s music worth?”—into an analytical labyrinth.

Add live music and the picture grows yet more intricate. Concert tickets represent only a fraction of audience spending: there’s also hospitality (food, drinks, accommodation for festival attendees), transport (local and long-distance), and merchandise. Each spending category flows through different sectors of the national economy, generating multiplier effects as money circulates. A €10 concert ticket might trigger ten times that total economic activity across bars, restaurants, retail, and transportation.

 

Two Pilot Studies, Two Methodological Solutions

OpenMusE’s music valuation pilots address these challenges through complementary approaches, one focused on live performance, the other on recorded consumption.

Pilot Study 1: Below the Tip of the Live Music Iceberg

The live music study—conducted by OpenMusE partners SSSA, UVA, EUBA, and SINUS—integrates open-access survey data on concert attendance and spending (collected from representative samples in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) with national statistics on total attendance and economic input-output tables from Eurostat.

Building on the methodology developed in the UK Live Music Census, the pilot study maps audience expenditure across four categories (tickets, transport, hospitality, merchandise) to standard industrial classifications, enabling calculation of gross value added (GVA) and full-time equivalent (FTE) employment. This data fusion approach links individual, microeconomic behaviour at concerts to measurable macroeconomic outcomes at the national level.

The results document substantial economic contributions:

  • Germany: €11.19 billion in GVA, supporting 212,000 FTE jobs
  • France: €5.5 billion GVA, supporting 108,000 FTE jobs
  • Spain: €3.3 billion GVA, supporting 80,000 FTE jobs
  • Italy: €2.1 billion GVA, supporting 43,000 FTE jobs
  • Poland: €0.8 billion GVA, supporting 43,000 FTE jobs

Across the seven-country sample, live music contributes over €46 billion in combined GVA, supporting approximately 835,000 jobs. Scaled to EU level, the direct economic impact is clearly much larger.

Pilot Study 2: Valuing Recorded Music While Respecting Data Confidentiality

The recorded music pilot tackles a different challenge: how to demonstrate music valuation methodology when some of the required data—platform revenues, rights flows, etc.—often remains commercially confidential.

The solution: synthetic data. OpenMusE partner REPREX created two fictional territories (“Livonia” and “Pomerelia”) with artificial revenue and quantity tables that mirror real CISAC-aligned reporting structures validated through consultation with partners SOZA and ARTISJUS. Synthetic listener-reported data on music use quantities were also created based on real cultural access and participation survey data. This approach enables end-to-end demonstration of a market comparator model valuation model, which relates use quantities to revenues to infer shadow prices—without exposing any real collecting society’s confidential numbers.

The approach is designed for transferability. Any CMO with access to standardised data could apply identical methods to generate comparable results within their legal and institutional constraints. The synthetic examples show what’s possible while respecting everyone’s rights.

 

More Than Just Numbers

The live music pilot study integrated data from OpenMusE’s cultural access and participation survey to show the macroeconomic impact of individual spending patterns. However, our survey also shows that music’s value goes beyond money and jobs. For 71% of French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Poles, it is crucial to overall quality of life. For more findings, check our data dashboard.

 

Why This Matters

Taken together, the OpenMusE data offer unprecedented insight into the holistic, economic and extra-economic value of music in Europe.

These aren’t just academic exercises. Without comprehensive valuation methods, music remains invisible in national economic accounts. And without transparent and transferable frameworks, cross-country comparison and EU-level policy guidance become impossible.

Music weaves through listening contexts, value chains, borders, and rights regimes in ways that defy simple accounting. However, our pilot studies prove that complexity doesn’t mean measurement is impossible. It just means we need better methods.

The full reports and supplementary data will be available by April at: