Open data is like gold in the mud below the chilly waves of mountain rivers. Panning it out requires a lot of patience, or a good machine. I think we will come to as surprising and strong findings as Bellingcat, but we are not focusing on individual events and stories, but on social and environmental processes and changes.
We do care what our children learn, but we do not care yet about what our robots learn from. One key idea behind trustworthy AI is that you verify what data sources your machine learning algorithms can learn from. As we have emphasised in our forthcoming academic paper and in our experiments, one key problem that goes wrong when you see too few small country artists, or too few womxn in the charts is that the big tech recommendation systems and other autonomous systems are learning from historically biased or patchy data.
In complex systems there are hardly ever singular causes that explain undesired outcomes; in the case of algorithmic bias in music streaming, there is no single bullet that eliminates women from charts or makes Slovak or Estonian language content less valuable than that in English.
Our new study opens the question of the local music promotion within the digital environment. The Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society (SOZA), the State51 music group in the United Kingdom, and the Slovak Arts Council commissioned Reprex to created a feasibility study which provides recommendations for better use of quotas for Slovak radio stations and which also maps the share and promotion of Slovak music within large streaming and media platforms such as Spotify.
While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. Preprint of our article with copyright researchers.