The MOZ concert collection

From Mozart to Metallica, from Pinkpop to The Big Sing. The MOZ (Muziekopnamen Zendgemachtigden = Music recordings of licensed broadcasters) collection contains recordings of concerts intended for broadcast on the Dutch public service broadcasters, on TV and radio. This collection has been made available as Linked Data, with the support of the Polifonia and Podiumkunst.net projects.

The concerts

Number of concerts in the MOZ collection

The earliest recordings date from early in the 20th century, and new concerts are still being broadcast. Warning: the concert in 1900 is an artefact of uncertainty in the metadata - this concert has no exact date but is from somewhere in the 20th century.

Number of concerts per year

The concerts are very diverse, and many different genres of music are represented.

Distribution of concerts over musical genres

An interesting question is, where do the recordings take place? Are these spread over the whole country, or do they mainly occur in the 'Randstad', the dominant Dutch conurbation that contains the four biggest cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht? We cannot answer this question with the data in its original form. There we see the same locations recurring multiple times, only written slightly differently. To be able to say something meaningful about the geographical distribution of concerts, we have cleaned this data by mapping a large number of locations to Wikidata. Now 30,634 (approximately a third) of the MOZ concerts have a standardised location at concert or clip level. As we have not been able to map all locations, the picture is still not complete. However, we can already give a better idea of the distribution of concerts over recording locations. The 'Randstad' indeed dominates. However, concerts have been recorded all over the country, often in churches.

Distribution of concerts over recording location

Concerts are often linked to certain events. Top are the festivals linked to certain times of the day, e.g. 'avondconcert (evening concert)' and 'zondagochtendconcert (Sunday morning concert)'. Christmas is a popular time for concerts - 'Gelegenheid: Kerst, Advent, Oud en Nieuw, Driekoningen (Occasional: Christmas, Advent, New Year and Epiphany)'. Some annual events appear less prominently, because the event has a new name every year, e.g. 'Pinkpop 2022'.

Events that concerts are linked to (Dutch names)

The artists

For most concerts we have information about the artists involved. Be aware that an artist can be an individual or a group (e.g. orchestra).

Percentage of concerts with information about artists

There is a large number of artists featured in total:

Artists can participate in a concert as a performer or creator. (NB: the data also contains some persons with the role 'guest' or simply 'person', but this is due to a conversion error, so these are excluded here).

Distribution of artists over roles

The top ten creators are all well-known international composers. Hover over the chart to discover more about them.

The top ten creators, on the basis of number of concerts

Creators can have different roles, for example composer, or music arranger. This chart shows the most frequently occurring roles for creators.

The top ten creator roles, on the basis of number of creators in that role

The top ten performers are a mix of orchestras, choirs and conductors. Hover over the chart to discover more about them.

The top ten performers, on the basis of number of concerts

Performers appear in different roles. Some of these roles contain information about the instruments played. We have linked a large number of instruments to Wikidata and the Performance Medium ontology. This visualisation shows the top ten most frequently occurring instruments in the Concert collection, for those instruments that have been linked. Hover over the bubbles for more information.

The top ten most frequently occuring instruments, on the basis of number of concerts

Linking the instruments to other ontologies allows us to incorporate more information about them. The above visualisation uses images from Wikidata. We can extend this to more information, for example the profile visualisation below allows you to listen to the instruments.

Profiles of the top ten most frequently occuring instruments, including audio samples from Wikidata

From Mozart to Metallica

The most frequently occurring creator in the metadata is Mozart. But which other creators and performers are associated with concerts with music from Mozart? This network shows his top ten connections, and per connection in turn their top ten connections. Hover over the dots to see the names.

Network of the top ten connections for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with each artist's own top ten connections in turn

We get a completely different view of the MOZ collection if we look at the connections of Metallica. The network is much smaller, and contains very different sorts of artists.

Network of the top connections for Metallica, with each artist's own top connections in turn

The organisations

The concerts are produced by various production companies, often public service broadcasters. Hover over the chart to discover more about them.

The top ten production companies, on the basis of number of concerts

The concerts were broadcast during the airtime allocated to the public service broadcasters. Hover over the chart to discover more about them.

The top ten broadcasters, on the basis of number of concerts

Links with other collections

Many of the persons in the MOZ collection are linked to other collections. For example, Mozart is represented in the collection by his identifier in the GTAA thesaurus. But he is also linked to his identifier in the Discogs collection, and to his Wikidata page. In this way, the MOZ collection is enriched.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision also manages the Muziekweb collection of albums. Some of the top ten creators and performers in the MOZ collection also have albums on Muziekweb, as we can see if we search for their names on Muziekweb. These links should be created automatically, then the two worlds of broadcast and published music would come closer together.

The number of music albums on Muziekweb for the top ten creators in MOZ

The number of music albums on Muziekweb for the top ten performers in MOZ

Finding the collection

The MOZ collection is registered in the NDE and Clariah data registries. It can be viewed in the Media Suite (metadata available for everyone, users with a Media Suite account can also play audio/video of some concerts), and as Linked Data on the Sound & Vision linked data endpoint. An interactive overview of the collection statistics can be found in this Jupyter Notebook, which you can run locally. Alternatively, you can try it out online in Google Colab (disclaimer: this is hosted by a third party).