🎙️ Welcome to the Open Music Europe Podcast — a series exploring the future of music in Europe. Guided by conversations curated by Mark Adam Harold, each episode features a special guest who helps unpack how we can build a music ecosystem that’s more competitive, fair, and sustainable. From cultural policy to live music, from war zones to venue data, these are the voices shaping the sound of tomorrow. This is Open Music Europe — let’s dive in.
Open Music Europe is funded by the European Union under Grant No. 101095295.
In this episode, host Mark Adam Harold speaks with Alona Dmukhoyska, from Music Export Ukraine, about the extraordinary resilience of Ukraine’s music industry during wartime. Alona shares how Ukrainian artists are building international bridges, navigating live events under air raid threats and redefining what it means to thrive through streaming and cultural advocacy.
In this episode, host Mark Adam Harold sits down with Marcel ÄŚas, former head of Slovakia's Institute for Culture Policy, to explore the challenges of implementing data-driven cultural policy in Eastern Europe. From navigating political discontinuity to building trust in post-communist societies, Marcel shares insights on why evidence-based decision-making in culture is both crucial and difficult to achieve.
In our debut episode, we sit down with Dr. James Rhys Edwards, the project director of OpenMusE, to discuss how data, metadata, and technology are reshaping the music landscape. From the impact of COVID-19 on local music scenes to the challenges of fair compensation in the streaming era, we dive deep into what it takes to build music ecosystems that are truly competitive, fair, and sustainable.