Fair MusE at the EUI 2025 Digital Democracy Conference: Addressing Inequalities in the Digital Age
Fair MusE will take part in the 2025 edition of the Digital Democracy Conference organised by the European University Institute (EUI) on November 20–21 in Florence (Italy). This year the conference is dedicated to “Understanding and Addressing Digital Inequalities.” The annual scientific conference -led by the Robert Schuman Centre, the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF), and the Centre for a Digital Society (CDS)- will explore how digitalisation shapes economic, social, and cultural divides, and what policy tools are needed to bridge them.
On 20 November, Giuseppe Mazziotti, Principal Investigator and Coordinator of Fair MusE, will serve as Discussant in the panel “The right to access and the right to a fair pay. Cultural divide and copyright challenges in the AI era.” The session brings together a group of international scholars examining how legal design, data practices, and platform governance contribute to structural inequalities in the digital music industry and in domains where AI can erode cultural agency. This panel will include a presentation by Marina Rossato Fernandes and Antonios Vlassis, both researchers within the Fair MusE project, on “Defining fairness in the digital music industry: perspectives from music industry professionals.” Their contribution highlights how practitioners across the music ecosystem perceive fairness, diversity, and value distribution in an increasingly platform-dominated environment, offering a direct link to Fair MusE’s empirical and policy-oriented research.
On 21 November, Professor Mazziotti will also chair the session “Social media, disinformation and communities,” which investigates how social media have influenced territorial and demographic dimensions of digital inequality. This panel ranges from online disinformation to the differentiated impacts of social media on vulnerable societies and groups.
Bringing its research perspective to multiple sessions, Fair MusE highlights how platform governance, data asymmetries, and algorithmic systems influence fairness and accessibility in digital cultural markets. By contributing to the EUI’s interdisciplinary forum, Fair MusE reinforces its mission to connect academic research with broader debates on digital inequality, cultural rights, and the governance of online platforms, key issues for the future of the European digital public ecosystem.
