Existing mechanisms for assessing the value of music tend to focus on economic aspects and do not take into account the true impact of music on our emotions, decisions, and even our health. What's more, Collective Management Organizations lack information to accurately distribute royalties, creators lack information about how their music is being used, and policymakers lack detailed information about the social and economic value of music. For this reason, the Music360 project, driven by a European consortium, aims to create a platform that measures both the economic and non-economic value of music usage, going beyond traditional metrics. Music360 uses a model-driven approach combined with artificial intelligence techniques to assess the impact of music on concrete scenarios related to healthcare, cultural heritage and customer experience, among others. As a result, it can advocate for a fairer distribution of royalties and a better understanding of the multi-faceted value of music.
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The musical works played in stores, bars, restaurants and other venues contribute to business profits and customer satisfaction. This background music must pay specific royalties for its use, which are related to intellectual property rights (IPR). The valuation of background music royalties is usually based on measures that do not take into account the people who listen to the music, much less the positive or negative efects of music on people’s well-being. For example, a bar pays royalties based on the square footage of the venue regardless of the number of customers listening; i.e., a bar pays the same whether 10 or 100 customers listen to the music being played.
On the other hand, various studies show the impact that music has on people’s behavior[
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). configure the background playlist according to their customers’ profiles, or hospitals could play specific musical works that improve patients’ treatment.
This paper presents a model-driven approach that integrates novel AI and data science
solutions to address the challenge of capturing and representing the economic and non-economic
aspects of music valuation. This approach is part of the European Music360 project [
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief background and analysis of related work. Section 3 presents the main elements of the proposed model-driven approach. Finally, Section 4 presents our main conclusions, ongoing work, and expected impact.
Background music, including recordings and live performances, collects the 28% of royalties
for artists, more than streaming, which collects 21%[
However, there are some problems with the current criterion for distributing the money
collected to eligible right-holders[
In addition, diferent contexts and areas of application can vary the actual value of the music
played, for example, improving the patient’s well-being[
It is therefore necessary to develop a method that improves the valuation of music in order
to generate a ”fair remuneration” for the use of music. In the context of the European project
Music360 1, we propose that it is possible to define a common conceptual model of the diferent
elements that determine the real value of music for diferent stakeholders and venues. This
conceptual model can be implemented using model-driven engineering techniques [
Moreover, most of the existing approaches related to measuring diferent dimension of music
value, such as social or cultural music efect, lack supporting technology to share the obtained
results [
The use of a model-driven engineering approach will formalize common concepts around music value, as well as facilitate the interoperability of information between the diferent actors in the music value chain. Furthermore, the proposed approach will allow researchers to leverage existing information on economic and non-economic music value, and share the generated knowledge with the community to improve music value assessment.
The Music360 conceptual model is intended to provide a framework for understanding, quantifying, and analyzing music value in a comprehensive and consistent manner. Figure 1 - Part A shows the core elements associated with the Music360 Conceptual Model, which are described below: • Value Dimensions. There are two main value dimensions: the economic (or monetary) dimension, which is mainly related to financial measures of collecting and paying music royalties; and the non-economic dimension, which is divided into three main value types: Social Value, Cultural Value, and Therapeutic Value. • Stakeholders. Entities that play diferent roles in the music value chain, which goes from the music work creation to the music use. In general terms, these stakeholders can be classified in right holders, royalty distributors, and end-users (venues or people). • Music Creation. It defines the concepts related to music works that include compositions, recordings, and live performances, indicating the artists involved in the creation. These artists are the right-owners that normally benefit of the music royalty distribution.
However, the music rights can be also transferred to third parties. • Music Use. It considers the play of the music works in diferent venues, adding the necessary metadata to generate richer analysis of the music efect, such as temporal and geographical information, music tempo, lyrics language, music genre, venue type, etc. • Rights and license management. Represented by diferent relationships in Figure 1. It is closely related to the economic valuation of music use. It indicates the beneficiaries of the royalties from the use of music (right holders) and the diferent schemes in which the use of music can be licensed.
positively or negatively, e.g. a piece of music that generates positive cultural engagement in a local celebration may have a negative efect in another context.
Moreover, the non-economic values are also divided into cultural, social and therapeutic
values. This division corresponds to the application domain of various living labs [
Overall, the Music360 project aims to create a fair and sustainable European music ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders involved in the creation, distribution, and use of music. It is expected that the implementation of the music360 platform, supported by the proposed modeldriven approach, will enable interoperability among diferent stakeholders, standardize data management across the music value chain, facilitate data collection in live music and public venues, enable real-time analytics for streaming and social networks, and facilitate evidencebased decisions about new business opportunities for stakeholders, among other benefits. These results will be made possible by the interdisciplinary collaboration of computer science, marketing, and social science research teams, together with the support of various CMOs and companies related to the creation and use of music. The project aims to make the final versions of all generated software available to society with an open source license if no dependencies exist 3. In this way, music organizations and creators would have accurate information about the distribution of royalties and the use of music, policymakers would have details about the social and economic value of music, and researchers would be able to generate new studies and share knowledge about the impact of music in diferent areas.
Work partially funded by Horizon Europe RIA programme Music360 grant No 101094872.