Green Paper on AI, Data Governance, and Metadata Policies for Europe’s Music Ecosystem
We are pleased to release version 0.9.0 of the Green Paper on AI, Data Governance, and Metadata Policies for Europe’s Music Ecosystem. This document presents a practical roadmap for improving the way Europe creates, manages, links, and reuses music data — across rights organisations, libraries, archives, labels, platforms, cultural institutions, and community collections.
The Green Paper serves two purposes
First, it provides the policy context for the Open Music Europe project: how our work aligns with the EU’s data strategy, AI policies, copyright reforms, cultural-heritage infrastructures, and the European Interoperability Framework.
Second, it explains the practical foundations of the Open Music Observatory, the decentralised data-sharing infrastructure we are building with partners across Europe.
Version 0.9.0 introduces several major improvements:
- A clearer explanation of the data challenges facing Europe’s music ecosystem and why metadata quality, interoperability, and provenance matter for creators, cultural institutions, and digital services.
- A fully revised outline of our six reform areas, including fixing metadata at the source, building federated data spaces, and providing AI as a shared utility.
- Stronger alignment with the CITF First Project Report on trustworthy, machine-readable copyright data in the AI era — showing how our domain-specific work in music complements and operationalises CITF’s cross-sector recommendations.
- An overview of the four federated modules already connected to the Open Music Observatory:
– the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb)
– the Hungarian Music Database (HuMDb)
– the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space
– and the Open Music Europe core module
Together, these modules demonstrate that a European Music Observatory can grow incrementally and collaboratively, rather than through a single top-down data repository.
The Green Paper is an open consultation document, and we warmly welcome comments from music-sector organisations, cultural institutions, researchers, and public administrations. Over the past months we have already received valuable input from IAML, IAMIC, CISAC members, Europeana and ECCCH communities, Wikidata contributors, national stakeholders in Slovakia, Latvia, and Hungary, and many others. This consultation will continue throughout 2025.
On Tuesday we will participate in the next CITF feedback session, where we will present how our Green Paper aligns with the CITF’s findings and how our pilots already put many of these ideas into practice. This dialogue helps ensure that Europe’s copyright-infrastructure initiatives and our music-sector data work remain mutually reinforcing.
Version 0.9.0 is now available on Zenodo under a versioned DOI. We will continue refining the document as further comments arrive.
