Towards Fair Streaming: Introducing the FairMusE project

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.

Questions or comments? Discuss them here!

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If I have my personal music server, will my data still help for their research?

This is such an important project!! So glad that LB users + data can be part of something like this, which could have a big impact.

I’m not sure if it’s mentioned anywhere, but based off the available countries in the profile creation list they are looking for EU users only, so little Aotearoa New Zealand can’t be of any help this time. But if you’re a EU LB user and your data is already public via LB, it would be awesome if you could help shed some light on some of the bigger, possibly eeeeevil, streaming algorithms…

Hey, I didn’t say “Spotify”, you just immediately thought “Spotify”. Nothin’ to do with me!

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Hello all!

It’s nice to meet you. I’m Antoine, along with my team from the University of Lille. We will be analyzing all this data.

Please don’t hesitate to ask me any questions you may have. I’d be happy to provide more information!

Thank you for your contribution and interest.

Best regards,
Antoine

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Dear @yomo12,

Thank you for your question. You’re using something like Ampache? Unfortunately, we won’t be able to connect to this type of music server, as our goal is to analyze recommendations from streaming services, which are essentially a “black box.”

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Dear @aerozol
Thank you for your feedback and support - we’ll do our best to make an impact in the sector!

Indeed, for legal purposes, we shouldn’t consider data from outside the EU.

The LB database is impressive (I’m also contributing now), but to analyze it fruitfully, we need some contextual information about donors. This will help ensure the validity of your research as much as possible. For that, we just need your id and you to answer to few questions.

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@antoinefairmuse this seems to be a valuable research project.

I tried to link my LB account, but failed, though. The original process failed with some error message I don’t remember. I ended up creating an account on fairmuse.eu, which worked. But now I cannot link my LB account name. Following the link on Fair MusE Portal – Listen Brainz – portal.fairmuse.eu now just shows the “Thank you for your donation!” message, but my LB account name is actually not linked to my profile.

Can this be resolved?

Oh, you can’t join if you’re in the UK? :frowning:

It does say EU, and there was a kerfuffle about that a while ago as you might remember :wink:

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Yes, the Fair MusE project focusses on the EU countries, so unfortunately we cannot receive submissions from outside the EU

Dear @outsidecontext the issue is fixed!
You can add your id to your profil or edit to add it.

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Yes, I got all excited and then I realised… :cry: :eu:

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@boysmithers! Even if you’re outside EU, you can participate: You just leave the ‘country’ field blank…