Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project

Hello ListenBrainz community!

As you know, we’ve been working hard on building recommendations and other music discovery tools as part of ListenBrainz. Our frustrations with online streaming providers and their questionable discovery features have long been a source of frustration for us, so we worked hard to build recommendations with as little bias as possible.

Fortunately, we’re not alone in our frustration with the steaming providers – researchers at Aalborg University, Denmark and Lille University, France are currently questioning the fairness of these music recommendations and have asked ListenBrainz and its community to help them with this task.

The researchers are looking for ListenBrainz users to give their permission for their public ListenBrainz data to be used as part of this research. If fair music discovery services are of importance to you, please read on and consider granting the researchers permission to use your data:

Share your listening data with the researchers and help us fight for a fair and transparent music streaming ecosystem! 

Dear members of the ListenBrainz community:

We would like to invite you to participate in an innovative research project taken on by a range of European researchers and institutions – among them Aalborg University in Denmark, and Lille University, France. 

Our research project Fair MusE investigates how music streaming services’ algorithms recommend music to users, as well as how both musicians and users are affected by these algorithms. 

The goal of the project is to open the black box of the algorithms to the public and to create a solid knowledge base for upcoming negotiations in the EU, where there is currently strong momentum for stronger regulation of the major streaming platforms. 

Our results will contribute to ensuring that the platforms take on a higher degree of responsibility for ensuring diversity and equal conditions in the music sector—for example, that smaller and niche artists are also given consideration.

But we need your help to reach our goal

The major streaming services do not allow us to examine their algorithms—therefore, we must investigate them through user data.

Connect with Fair MusE

If you share your ListenBrainz ID with us, we can analyze how the streaming services recommend music—and whether it is done in a fair way. 

Connect your ListenBrainz ID

We will, in return, provide visualizations of the fairness and diversity in your and other users’ listening. These visualizations and your opinions about them are our way towards creating a fairness score for streaming services. This fairness score is one of the key outcomes of the Fair MusE EU research project. We will also keep you updated on the project.

Data is not everything

Your experience of using the platforms, your opinions about their recommendations and suggestions are also important for us. We want to know whether fairness and diversity matters to streaming users, and if so: in which way fairness and diversity? If you just want to listen to music, not thinking so much about fairness we indeed also want to talk to you! The opinions and statements we gather will be part of our work creating the ‘fairness score’.

If we may contact you for an interview, please give us your mail address or other contact info here: https://portal.fairmuse.eu/interview/ The interview will be online, last about 30 minutes and your answers will be anonymised.

We would also invite you to fill out a short survey — all data will be deleted after the project is completed, before March 1, 2027.

What we need from you

If you want to help us we need you to create a user profile so we can comply with GDPR. To make the statistics for the EU-reporting we need to ask you in which country you live, your gender and your approximate age. 

Do you want to know more?

You might be interested in our Fair MusE project introduction video!

Should you have any questions about this project, please reach out to us: Jannick Kirk Sørensen (Work package leader), Ph.D. Associate Professor at Dept. of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark: js@es.aau.dk or research assistant Rose Holm roseh@es.aau.dk, or leave a comment below!

Thanks!

EDIT: Please note that FairMusE project can only accept data from EU users.