Explore Fair MusE Data

What does fairness look like?

On this page, we explore visualisations of the music data shared by you and others with the Fair MusE project. Here we present various visualisations and ask for your feedback to help us determine how to best represent fairness in music streaming. In Fall 2025, we plan to use these insights to propose a ‘fairness score’ for music streaming platforms.

Please share your suggestions and comments here:  https://portal.fairmuse.eu/contact/

If you’d like to join the Fair MusE community and learn more about your own music listening habits, follow our step-by-step guides for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. These guides will help you exercise your GDPR rights to request the data collected by the streaming platforms and share it with the Fair MusE Portal. Together, we can work towards a fairer music streaming ecosystem.

The box plots depict the distribution of data. The box encloses the largest portion of the data in each category (from the 25th to the 75th percentile, Q1 and Q3, respectively). The horizontal line inside each box is the median (middle point of the distribution). The whiskers (vertical lines) correspond to ±1.5 times the interquartile range (IQR: Q3-Q1).

  • Most donors (from the lowest to highest box limits) in our dataset register between 20k and 200k listening events approximately.
  • Donors over the age of 60 show the smallest listening event counts (less than 20k).
  • Donors with more than 300k listening events were considered outliers and were excluded from the figure.

The figure shows the distribution of donors by their country of residence. Each slice of the donut plot shows how many donors there are by country, shown as a percentage of the total 159. Approximately 50% of the donors come from Denmark, France, and Portugal. Around 30% of the donors come from Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Spain.

The vast majority of our donors (~96%) use Spotify as their main streaming service. A majority of Spotify users is expected because of their market share dominance (~32%). However, this fact does not account for the ample difference in proportion between platforms. For reference, Apple Music’s market share represents ~40% of Spotify’s market share, and YouTube Music represents ~30% of Spotify’s market share.

The figure shows a histogram of monthly listening event counts (y-axis) by donor from May 2010 to January 2025 (x-axis). Most listening events are located in Northern, Western, and Southern Europe and are concentrated between 2019 and 2024. During this period, there were more than 100k monthly listens, reaching a peak of ~200k monthly listening events in January 2023.

The figure examines the countries from where music is consumed in our donor database. The y-axis shows the Domestic ratio (DR), i.e., the proportion of tracks from donors’ country of origin to the proportion of tracks from other countries. A higher DR means that donors listen to more tracks from their own countries while lower DR values mean they listen to more international music.

The x-axis shows the country of residence popularity, i.e., ranking the proportion of tracks from one country to the total number of tracks from all other countries, as a percentage. Values are jittered for better visualization.