6 Avoiding the use of personal data, data protection guidelines

The survey and the following data processing and analysis will be provided by two data scientist researchers, Daniel Antal and Sanne de Roever. The researchers will not record any personal information about you. They will record and process data about you in a way that minimizes the risk of you being personally identified. They will create national statistical data from your answers that will be made public in a way that it is impossible to find out whose data was used for this.

We are asking you to participate in a research that is mainly intended to be used in a statistically aggregated way. We do not want to find out about your earnings – we want to see the average earnings in your country. We are not interested in your song – we want to analyze the average earning potential of a song from your country compared to an average song from another country.

For avoidance of doubt, our survey data collection does not fall under the scope of the data handling rules of the GDPR regulation, because we want to avoid recording any personal data about you. If you optionally give us a contact address for feedback, that falls under GDPR rules [see 6.1].

However, if you ask a personal feedback, there is a risk that you may be accidentally identified. The following subsections describe how we try to avoid this.

The researchers are making a pledge to make an effort to avoid you being accidentally identified. For full transparency, they describe the steps made to ensure that your personal data will not accidentally come to their possession.

6.1 Optional Addresses And Personal Feedback On Survey

In case you would like to receive a personalized feedback, you will have to provide the researchers an email address where we can send back to personalized feedback.

The email address may contain personal information, for example, if your email address contains your name in a format. In order to prevent such information leaking to the analysis, the contact details are handled in a separate file. The email addresses will never be given to anybody, the feedback sent to you will never be sent to anybody else, and the contents will not be stored after being sent to you. The personal feedback is intended as a one-time useful, courtesy report for the time you invest into answering in our survey, and not as a basis of a commercial relationship between the researchers and you.

The purpose of storing the email addresses are the following.

  • If you asked for personal feedback you will get it to this address.

  • We will send you a website address where you can download the national or regional report, which does not contain your personal data.

  • If you do not ask the email address to be deleted, we will invite you to the next survey in 2020 in a non-personalized email sent to the same address. We are running the surveys once a year (in some countries, in two years).

we will not give your address to any third party for promotion, and we will not send you any other e-mails.

6.2 Optional Identifying Your Artist ID and Recording

In case you want to have your recording analyzed, we must identify your recording for this purpose. In this case, we still do not want to record or store any personal data about you, such as your name.

We will use your Spotify Artist ID and the recordings Spotify ID to make the analysis, using only data that is currently publicly available on Spotify’s media platforms and API connected with your survey answers. While we want to avoid storing personal data about you, we know the Spotify Artist ID and the Spotify ID may reveal information about you. For this reason, we will only connect this information with your survey answers only while we are creating your personalized report to you. We will create a PDF file and sent it to your email address. We will not keep any copies of the machine generated PDF files in our systems and provide anybody another copy.

If you decide to give us the Spotify Artist ID and the Spotify ID of songs to be analyzed, we will store it separated from your survey data, and together with your conntact information. We will not give access to third parties to this information.

To avoid any doubt, even with this identification we will not receive any information that is private to you on Spotify, such as your royalty statements, your address or any personal information. We will only access information that is publicly available on the Spotify platform about your music, which will include your artist name.

###Newly released artists

In case you want to have your recording analyzed, but it is not released yet on Spotify, our distribution partner will try to release it in 5 days.

You will make a distribution contract with our distribution partner and give personal data to them. Once your recording is successfully released, they will provide us with your recordings Spotify ID and Artist ID and use it exactly as the IDs of already released artists.

We will not receive any personal information from the distributor.

##Risk Of Accidental Personal Identification Our aim is avoid connecting any personalized feedback to your name, and we want to avoid that your personal data is combined with non-personal and non-individual data. However, the report that is generated may be completely personal, for example, if you are a singer-songwriter, and your recording in the analysis is released under you name.

For full transparency, we provide you with two examples.

In the case your recording is released as ‘Jane Doe – My Life’ and you filled out our questionnaire, you will get a report that will show what are Jane Doe’s career and financial success factors compared to other musicians in your country. Your Spotify Artist ID will be recorded on your survey answer, and it is also available in the Spotify API. Our program will connect your data with the data available via the Spotify API and generate a report for you that will be sent to the email address you provided. However, we will not store the survey answers and the Spotify API data together. We will create a PDF document for you that we will delete after sending to you.

If your recording is made with many artists as a band, and it is released as ‘Anonymous Band – Our Song’, we may never find out which band members data was connected to the properties of the song. After creating and sending the PDF report, we will delete the PDF file and the two data files will be stored separately.

##No commercial agreement In the last two years CEEMID was designing better ways to reward the many quarter hours or more time devoted by musicians to our surveys. If you decide to fill out the survey semi-anonymously, you can personally benefit in two ways from the survey.

First, you will receive a personal feedback detailing your performance opportunities, incomes in comparison with your colleagues in your country and internationally. For this, you do not have to provide us a real name, but at least a working email address where you can receive results.

Second, if you have at least one published song on Spotify, you will compare your song’s engineering and musical qualities, audience with more than a hundred thousand songs’ complete royalty payment history. This way we believe that we can give you a good assessment about the songs’ strength and weaknesses and give you guidance where it may find new audiences in your country and in the wider Central and Eastern European region. For artists who are not yet published or not yet distributed on Spotify, we offer a possibility to release 1-4 recordings in this experiment to gain experience how would they compare with their competitors. All information will be prompted in the survey, but you can read it on our website before filling out the questions if you want to.

For avoidance of doubt, we do not enter into a commercial agreement with you. As a courtesy for the effort that you make to fill out our long questionnaire, we are trying to give back some of your data in a useful way to. Our promise is to send a copy of your data to an email address that you provide for this reason. We will not try to identify you and we will not give your contact details to anybody. You do not have to pay for the report that is sent back to the address provided to you.

If you believe that you want to build a relationship with CEEMID, you are always welcome to contact us. For the safety of the information provided to us, we do not want to take contact with you in connection with our anonymous research.