Hungary | Antal Dániel honlapja

Spaces of a Constructive Dialogue

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This project, developed more than twenty years ago shortly after my participation in a UK future leaders programme, represents one of my earliest attempts to create a structured, collaborative platform for emerging artists and curators. Conceived and executed by a group of very young practitioners, the initiative combined curatorial experimentation, documentation, and network-building at a time when such cross-disciplinary approaches were far less formalised than today.

The archival documents reflect both the ambition and the limitations of that moment: they are exploratory, the documentation is uneven, but already articulate a clear intention to connect artistic practice with broader structures, and the selected artists and their work is timeless. Looking back, what is most striking is not the program’s polish, but its orientation toward collaboration, visibility, and long-term cultural positioning—principles that have remained central in my later work.

A decade after the project, several of the participants went on to establish themselves as significant figures in the cultural field, developing independent artistic practices and contributing to international exhibitions and curatorial platforms. For example, curator Barnabás Bencsik later became the director of the Ludwig Museum, Endre Koronczi one of the most respected and socially engaged creative artists of Hungary, the young photographer Gergő László founded Lumen, which remains an iconic cultural location in Budapest, and Samu Szemery, co-curator of the architectural interventions on the branch lines of Nógrád County railways, became one of the founders of Hungary’s Contemporary Architecture Centre. I remain grateful for their enthusiastic participation, bravery, and friendship.

For me, this work marks a formative moment: an early prototype of the ecosystem thinking that would later underpin initiatives such as Reprex and the Open Music Observatory in a much more formalised and technological form. While the documents belong to a different stage of life, they already reveal a consistent concern with how cultural value is created, documented, and sustained over time—an interest that continues to define my professional and research practice.

The programme itself, titled Spaces of a Constructive Discourse, was conceived as follows:

Spaces of a Constructive Discourse

The programme was conceived as a structured initiative to create new forms of dialogue between cultural production and public life in Hungary during a period of social and economic transition, just in the months of Hungary’s EU accession. It aimed to explore how public art and cultural interventions could contribute to addressing societal issues, particularly where traditional institutional channels were limited or ineffective. Rather than treating art as autonomous, the programme positioned it as an active medium for engaging with public concerns and social realities.

At its core, the initiative functioned as a multi-stakeholder platform, bringing together artists, sociologists, civil society actors, policymakers, and local communities. Through workshops, discussions, and pilot projects, it created a space where different forms of knowledge—artistic, social scientific, and administrative—could interact. The intention was not only to generate artistic outcomes, but to enable mutual learning and to integrate insights from cultural practice into broader policy and institutional frameworks.

A key objective of the programme was to expand participation in public discourse, particularly by including voices that had previously been excluded from decision-making processes. It sought to develop mechanisms through which cultural projects could surface local problems, articulate new perspectives, and feed these back into governance and reform processes. In this sense, the programme anticipated later approaches to participatory culture and socially engaged art, framing cultural activity as part of a wider system of societal feedback and transformation.

Operationally, the programme followed a structured workflow: identifying social problems, conducting research, implementing public interventions, and evaluating outcomes, followed by feedback loops into future actions. It also placed strong emphasis on partnerships and clearly defined roles (curators, coordinators, mediators). Taken together, it can be understood as an early attempt to design cultural production as a systemic, collaborative process—linking artistic experimentation with institutional learning and long-term social impact.

Federating Music Library Data in Hungary – A Call to Action

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:45:00 +0200

How can music library services be modernized to compete with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music Classical? How can we make it easy for music students, educators, amateurs, or professional musicians to find the sheet music of a piece that interests them? And how can schoolchildren explore the music of their town or region—with the help of local musicians, teachers, or librarians—given the limited financial resources of university and public libraries worldwide?

Our tools are open-source and free to test, and we are happy to support those interested in exploring them. We are also planning a meetup in Budapest at the end of August or beginning of September to discuss these ideas further with IAML Hungary members.

🇭🇺 Olvasd magyarul el ezt a bejegyzést - Hungarian version of this post.

Daniel Antal, co-founder of Reprex, originally presented at the IAML 2025 Congress alongside librarian Anna Mester and Anna Žilková, head of IAML Slovakia. Their presentation and poster explored the legal, organizational, and information science aspects of the data-sharing infrastructure behind the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database (SKCMDb). A year earlier, the Hungarian professional community encountered this work at the Networkshop 2024: Digital Transformation of Education, Research, and Public Collections conference, in the talk and paper titled A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei [Opportunities for Federating the Slovak Data Exchange Space in Hungary].

At the IAML Congress, we invited international partners to test, critique, and help develop a live demo service. Thanks to Salzburg’s geographical and cultural proximity, we were joined by many Hungarian colleagues.

The Reprex team is explaining our collaborative work to music metadata experts in Salzburg. Photo: Anna Žilková.

Our project’s ambitious goal is to make all music created within the territory of present-day Slovakia accessible through a semantic database. This includes a user-friendly graphical interface for individuals and API access for libraries and other institutions. The database connects known works and their variants, manuscript and published scores, and demo, archival, and commercial recordings. It also links composers and performers to secondary sources in libraries and archives that provide musicological context.

In Slovakia, we are integrating materials from the Music Fund, the Slovak Music Centre, and the SOZA database (sister organization to Artisjus). This enables us to substantially improve the data quality of public music library catalogues, which often lack detailed, work-level descriptions of scores. Metadata is frequently incomplete, outdated, or even incorrect. For example, a catalogue may refer to a composer’s “collected works” or “selected sonatas,” but rarely indicate which edition contains a particular sonata or movement a listener may have just encountered on a streaming playlist.

Our poster presented by Daniel Antal, Anna Márta Mester (librarian-data steward) and Anna Žilková (chairperson of IAML Slovakia) on 8 July 2025 on IAML 2025. You can download our poster in PDF here.

Our Salzburg presentation explored key questions:

How does data governance work between private and public organizations—such as between a rights management society or streaming platform and a university or public library?
How can we reduce redundant workflows through data exchange?
How can deeper, semantically enriched search improve music library services?
What transferable insights from information and library science can help libraries, archives, museums, and private actors mutually improve their data?
The development of this system is supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, through the Open Music Europe project. Our aim is to offer a federated, decentralized alternative to the centralized but never built European Music Observatory model—one that builds on existing national, regional, and pan-European data systems in a networked way and leaves data ownership and control in place following the subsidiarity principle.

Sneak peak: http://135.181.91.51:3007/en/

If you care about interoperability, cultural equity, and the future of library relevance in the streaming era—this is your moment to get involved.

Missed IAML2025?
👉 Presentation
👉 Poster
👉 Please contact us directly to try out our system.
👉 Blogpost about the wider context of our work, relevant for IAML, not only national chapters and invidivual members.

A szlovák adatkicserélési tér magyarországi föderációjának lehetőségei

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software.

Supplementary notes can be added here, including code and math.

Federating the Slovak Music Dataspace: Replication in Hungary

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 14:00:00 +0100

This presentation will be made in the Hungarian language. A similar presentation in English is available here.

Vajon miért nem ajánl a Spotify híres ajánlórendszere Szlovákiában szlovák embereknek elég szlovák zenét? És miért akadoznak az egyébként is nem kielégítő számú meghallgatások után a kifizetések? Ezek voltak azok a kérdések, amelyekre a Szlovák Művészeti Tanács kis összegű ösztöndíjával, a state51 támogatásával a Reprex és a SOZA válaszokat kezdett keresni 2020-ban. Azok az adatproblémák, amelyek a nem kielégítő eredményekre vezetnek, nem csak Szlovákiában, hanem lényegében minden kisebb nyelvterületen jelen vannak.

A Szlovák Zenei Adattér egy Horizon Europe programban finanszírozott mintaprojekt, amelyben különböző közgyűjteményi és magán jogkezelői adatok és metaadatok összekapcsolására kerül sor. Az adatkapcsolás jogi, szervezési és szemantikai megoldásai a zenei területtől függetlenül hasznosíthatók különböző jogi státuszú könyvtári-, levéltári-, múzeumi és magán adatbázisok összekapcsolására.

Az előadás célja kettős volt: egyrészt szeretnénk olyan zenei adattulajdonosokat találni, akik láthatóbbá és használhatóbbá szeretnék tenni a gyűjteményeiket Magyarországon. A másodlagos cél az előadásban bemutatott nyílt forráskodú technikák és nyílt adatok kulturájának a terjesztése Magyarországon.

From Slovakia Towards a European Music Dataspace

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:30:00 +0100

This presentation was made in the Hungarian language. A similar presentation in English is available here.

Lightning Talk About the Slovak Music Dataspace

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0100

This Lightning talk about the advantages of thinking in datas (sharing) spaces was made in Hungarian for the audience of Networkshop ‘24. For an English language introduction to the topic in the same context see Open Music Dataspace.

Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:00:00 +0000

CEEMID & Consolidated Independent presented and discussed with stakeholders the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Report 2020 as a case-study on national and comparative evidence-based policymaking in the cultural and creative sector on the CCS Ecosystems: FLIPPING THE ODDS Conference – a two-day high-level stakeholder event jointly organized by Geothe-Institute and the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission with the Creative FLIP project.

The CEE Report builds on the results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.

Our research findings were earlier presented and discussed in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Bratislava with stakeholders.

You can find the earlier presentations in the blog section of the website.

Executive Summary

The first Central European Music Industry Report is the result of a co-operation that started among stakeholders in three EU countries five years ago to measure the economic value added of music – the basis of a modern royalty pricing system. This gave birth to CEEMID, originally the Central & Eastern European Music Industry Databases, a data integration programme that now in 2020, covers all of Europe. CEEMID fulfils similar roles to the planned European Music Observatory and supports all pillars of the future pan-European system.

The comparison of Western and Eastern music audiences reveals key demographic differences that make the unchanged adoption of business practices from mature markets in the region questionable. Chapter 2 of this report will show these differences and their consequences on music markets, in terms of visiting and acquisition likelihood, frequency, seasonality and purchasing capacity. This is an example of how CEEMID fulfils the role of Pillar 3 (music, society and citizenship) in the planned European Music Observatory.

Chapter 3 contrasts market demand with the supply strategies of musicians. CEEMID has been surveying music professionals, including artists, technicians and managers about their working conditions, market conditions and plans for five years across a growing number of countries. In 2019 we invited 100 national and regional stakeholders to distribute our surveys. In some countries, our surveys already have several years of historic data, making the resulting musician database probably the largest ever source of data about how music is produced and how musicians live. We are constantly looking for partners to roll out this survey to new countries in new languages.

The CEE region has comparative advantages in big music events like festivals, and it has become one of the most important hubs for cultural tourism in the world. We explain this phenomenon in Chapter 4 by showing the differences in demand composition, demography and supply of venues in the second chapter. The lack of a modern and dense network of permanent music venues gave rise to magnificent music festivals in the CEE. Open’er, Sziget and Exit are among the biggest and best festivals in the world, closely followed by several smaller festivals in all countries. The share of festivals in the live music market is many times higher than in Western Europe and they provide vital export revenues to the local music economies. However, they play a limited role in finding new audiences for local artists, as they are increasingly programming for Western audiences by providing shows of international hits. They can only very partially fill in the gaps left by the small venue problem that hit the emerging markets harder than the UK or Australia, where policy action had been already taken to reverse the decline of the availability of smaller live music venues.

On the recording side, our analysis shows that modern digital services are growing at a faster rate than in mature markets. Because of lower repertoire competition, streaming quantities are similar for a typical Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovak track than in the mature markets. However, revenue growth is limited because of the interplay of several analysed factors. Our analysis of the live and recorded music markets shows that CEEMID fulfils the roles of the Pillar 1 (music economy) of the planned European Music Observatory.

Most recorded music sales revenue in the region comes from streaming platforms, just like in the mature markets. Successful sales strategies require a solid knowledge of the global marketplace and the ability to understand and train sales algorithms. Micro-enterprises, such as independent labels, have very limited ability to cope with these functions, given that they do not have market research or R&D functions. CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have started initiating open, national R&D consortia to create the necessary concentration in data assets, analytical capacity and budgets to close this gap. As a first step, CEEMID and Consolidated Independent have created a large, independent music dataset based on hundreds of millions of royalty statement entries to create our market indexes, styled after stock market and bond market indexes. Streaming opportunities are fast changing as roll-out of streaming services is happening at a different rate in various territories; subscription charges and the exchange rate to the producer’s currency vary and repertoire competition emerges in the market. Our volume and revenue indexes in Chapter 5.3 are aimed at creating sales algorithms that optimize sales volumes and expected revenues. We believe that this analysis also reveals that CEEMID partially fulfils the roles of Pillar 2 (music diversity and circulation) and feeds important data into Pillar 4 (innovation).

The region has far bigger untapped potential than most music business executives believe. Households in the region spend a significantly lower share of their recreational budget on music than their Western, Southern or Nordic peers. The region has a lot of untapped cultural purchasing power because servicing is particularly challenging in both the live and recorded sides of the business.

This upside potential cannot be tapped without better pricing. Royalty levels are often very low in the region. Due to many combined effects analysed in this short report, the gap between royalties earned in the CEE and Western Europe is several times bigger than the difference in GDP or national average wage. These gaps are partly caused by special interests preventing collective management from charging appropriate tariffs for restaurants, media companies or electronic appliance importers and manufacturers, and partly by unfavourable taxation of cultural products and services.

CEEMID was designed to create economic evidence on royalty pricing, private copying compensation and the creation of economic value added in the industry. In the first Hungarian Music Industry Report of ProArt and in the first Slovak Music Industry Report we have shown that economic and taxation policies of the CEE countries aimed to support car and electronics manufacturing create a distorted, unfavourable economic regime for creative industries. We want to help local stakeholders with economic evidence to correct these discriminatory policies during the overhaul of the EU VAT system. We have been helping various national organizations with economic evidence, presented in the light of latest EU jurisprudence, to improve their pricing activities. Our thousands of indicators were also used in ex ante evaluations of granting schemes.

In 2020, all EU member states will change their copyright administration legislation because of the national implementations of the 2019/790 Digital Single Market directive. CEEMID provides evidence in several countries about the size and impact mechanism of the value transfer, and generally the widespread use of the copyright exemption for private copying. We believe that the thousands of pan-European music industry indicators that we have aggregated over the five years will play a vital role in these regulatory processes.

CEEMID fulfils its roles with a very thorough exploitation of the EU’s 17-years-old Open Data regime with the re-use of public sector information, and a very careful mapping of the music industry. These maps help us conduct annual surveys among musicians and the audience, and they help us connect (always with pre-approval and with a user mandate) to industry databases. We do not only cover the EU countries, but increasingly (potential) candidate countries and neighbourhood countries.

In our vision, this data collection and integration, i.e. Pillars 1-3 should be available for all music stakeholders, should remain public and publicly funded. The last Pillar of the observatory, innovation, is where private entities should compete. The founders of CEEMID and Consolidated Independent believe that this report demonstrates the business and policy benefits of such a system with the analysis of the Central & Eastern European music markets. We believe that this way CEEMID is in a position to serve most of the planned functions of the envisioned European Music Observatory, and we are looking for ways to make either our thousands of indicators, or our data collection and integration software open source and available for all stakeholders in the EU and its neighbours. CEEMID was born out of necessity to level out the different levels of public research and statistical coverage of the EU member states. In our view, private entities in the future should focus their investments in Pillar 4 of the planned observatory, i.e. competing in innovation with creating new models, algorithms and services based on data that is available throughout the European Union without giving further advantage to the already mature markets.