Our ambition with the development of the Open Music Observatory is to provide the technological basis and a practical roadmap for creating a European Music Observatory in a bottom-up, decentralised way. Instead of waiting for a grand, central agreement on what should a European music observatory be collecting and who should control it, we suggest a pragmatic approach: allow any data owners and collectors who satisfy certain quality and cooperation rules to add their data to an Open Music Observatory; when it reaches a sufficient maturity for use in Europe, then decide if its maintenance requires a new institutional form or not.

Creating the Open Music Observatory is a cornerstone task of the OpenMusE project. This task is running till the end of the project (31 December 2025) with the collection, processing, and dissemination of more data and providing innovative, new data services in line with our exploitation pathways. This report is an accompanying document for the creation of Open Music Observatory as a digital infrastructure on the World Wide Web.

The Open Music Observatory is a digital service provider for the music industry that follows the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) definition for such services with a unique governance model. The governance model and the digital service infrastructure represent a unique innovation that considers many good examples from the European Union and other industries.