James Rhys Edwards (Sinus Institut, Berlin)
Quantitative methods and data in (popular) music research: A very short introduction

Music researchers and policymakers have spoken about “music ecosystems” for decades – mostly in a metaphorical sense, to express the complexity of music actor networks and their interdependencies. Recently, however, a shift has emerged “from metaphor to measurement” (Bernard et al., 2022; Berkers et al., 2023). An example is the Horizon Europe funding initiative CL2-2022-HERITAGE-01-05: “Towards a competitive, fair and sustainable European music ecosystem”. The OpenMusE project (https://openmuse.eu/), funded under this initiative, has experimented with a number of methods of operationalising and quantifying the ecosystem actors, governance systems, and resources at play in European (popular) music ecosystems. In this talk, the project director, Dr. James Rhys Edwards, will introduce the music ecosystem concept and four of the quantitative pilot studies that he and his colleagues are conducting:

• A “live music census” conducted in Helsinki, Mannheim and Heidelberg, Lviv, and Vilnius, in which venues in each city were mapped and surveys were used to take a “snapshot” of their musical life over a 24-hour period (work package 3).
• An environmental, social, and governance sustainability toolkit that allows music enterprises to set sustainability targets and assess their progress using a combination of accounting data and surveys (work package 3).
• A study on the impact of including different percentages of local music in background music playlists in hotels in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, and Vienna (work package 4).

In each case, Dr. Edwards will offer examples of how the methods in play could be transferred to other research contexts, asking: what qualitative and quantitative methods are currently used – and could potentially be used – to better understand the broad range of practices, actors, governance structures, and resources that musicologists study?  The talk will conclude with an informal “working session” in which the attendees are invited to reconsider their own music research (or more generally, their musical interests) within an “ecosystem” framework.

James Edwards received his doctorate in Ethnomusicology with a concentration on Systematic Musicology from University of California, Los Angeles in 2015. After working as a visiting scholar at Okinawa International University and an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark College, he joined SINUS-Institute Berlin in 2017. He coordinates the Horizon Europe project OpenMusE (https://www.openmuse.eu/), which leverages open-access software and data to support European music ecosystems in becoming more competitive, fairer, and more sustainable. Acting as co-principle investigator in EU-funded projects focused on both the creative and cultural sectors and other domains has given him an interdisciplinary and policy-oriented perspective on music research.