Fair MusE Project Ends: EU Praises Music Fairness Research

After three years of interdisciplinary research, the EU-funded Fair MusE project has officially wrapped up, earning a clean bill of health from its independent reviewers and the European Research Executive Agency (REA), which confirmed the project "has been completed" and "has fully achieved its objectives and milestones."

Fair MusE set out in March 2023 to answer a deceptively simple question: what does fairness actually mean in a music industry reshaped by streaming platforms, fragmented licensing, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence? Three years and 25 deliverables later, the consortium has an answer, and the European Commission’s independent expert reviewer says the project’s greatest achievement was giving that answer a vocabulary.

“The project contributed the most to the understanding of the meaning of fairness in the music industry,” the final review report states, noting that it “effectively gave language to a previously undefined concept that can be utilised in discourse on the functioning of [the] music industry as well as potentially in practice such as in the negotiation of contracts.”

A clean sweep on delivery

The numbers tell their own story. Across seven work packages, all 25 deliverables were accepted and all 10 project milestones were confirmed as achieved — from the original kick-off and Gender Action Plan through to the final Music Data Dashboard. The review report is unambiguous on execution: “All work packages were complete and all outputs delivered,” and the project was, in the reviewers’ words, “efficiently and effectively managed,” with the team “handling issues and changes appropriately, adjusting to the circumstances in a way that minimised the impact on the project.”

Every obligation under the grant agreement, including ethics and data management commitments, was respected, and all communication and dissemination activities, including proper reference to EU funding, were carried out as planned.

Among the project’s headline outputs:

The Music Data Dashboard and Fairness Score on Platforms, now live on the project website, give researchers, policymakers and creators a first-of-its-kind window into how value flows, or fails to flow, through streaming platforms. The Commission’s reviewers singled out the dashboard as providing “insight into the data and analysis the project has undertaken, contributing to the discourse around fairness in the music industry.”

The White Paper on Fairness in Music Ecosystems distills three years of legal, economic and technological analysis into recommendations designed to be accessible to policymakers and industry decision-makers alike, while two policy briefs and a policy roundtable carried the project’s findings directly into EU policy circles.

An open-access e-learning programme and a podcast series were built specifically to train and empower music creators, extending the project’s reach beyond academic and policy audiences to the working musicians its findings are meant to serve.

The project’s conclusions were showcased at its final conference, “Reclaiming Fairness in Europe’s Digital Music Ecosystem,” held in Brussels on 18 February 2026, following earlier co-creation workshops in Lisbon, Paris and Brussels that shaped the project’s direction throughout its lifetime.

Findings that still resonate

Beyond process, the reviewers affirmed that Fair MusE’s core questions have only grown more urgent. The final assessment found that “fragmented licensing systems, misaligned rights management structures, and limited data interoperability continue to undermine accurate attribution of uses and equitable distribution of revenues”, problems the project found were being compounded by the growing role of data-driven intermediaries and, more recently, artificial intelligence. The reviewers confirmed the project’s objectives “are still scientifically, technologically and economically relevant,” a judgment that positions Fair MusE’s frameworks as a live reference point rather than a historical snapshot.

The Commission also credited the consortium for responding seriously to feedback from its first-period review, noting the team “reinforced its interdisciplinary approach by integrating legal, economic, sociological, and data-driven perspectives” and sharpened its stakeholder engagement strategy in response to earlier recommendations, a sign, reviewers suggested, of a project that took external scrutiny as an opportunity to improve rather than a formality to survive.

On the strength of this record, the reviewers recommended “the acceptance of the resources, the work completed, as well as [the] dissemination, communication actions and exploitation plans” in full.

What’s next?

The review was not without constructive notes for the consortium’s next steps. Reviewers encouraged the team to sharpen how it measures success going forward, “measuring for actual impact, meaning uptake or change directly resulting from the project, rather than measuring dissemination”, and suggested deepening engagement with music makers themselves as the project’s tools and resources continue to circulate. They also flagged gender equity as an area for continued attention, recommending more diverse voices in future podcast episodes and closer engagement with feminist legal theory as the project’s frameworks are refined. The REA echoed this in its own letter, urging “greater attention… to gender equity and inclusiveness, as well as to the active involvement of music makers and other target users” as the project’s outputs are further developed and promoted.

None of these notes altered the bottom line. With every deliverable accepted, every milestone achieved, and the Commission’s own reviewers crediting the project with reshaping how fairness is discussed in the music industry, Fair MusE closes not just as a completed grant, but as a reference point its consortium, and the wider sector, can build on.

*Cover photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash