Fair MusE Hosts Book Launch Event with Prof. Jozefien Vanherpe on the Future of Music Contracts in the Streaming Era

On Wednesday, September 18th, the Fair MusE team at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon had the honor of hosting Prof. Jozefien Vanherpe from KU Leuven for the launch of her upcoming book, Music Contracts in the Streaming Age: Law and Policy in the European Union and the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

The event, hosted by Abreu Advogados at its splendid headquarters in central Lisbon, showcased Prof. Vanherpe’s in-depth exploration of the evolving contractual relationships between musicians and their key partners—music publishers and record labels—within the digitised music industry. Her book provides a comparative analysis of copyright contract laws in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, offering a critical examination of how these regulations impact music contracts from negotiation to termination, both in theory and in practice.

During the session, Prof. Vanherpe presented the core themes of her research, sparking a dynamic conversation on the complexities faced by composers and performers in the current music landscape. She highlighted the need for a nuanced legal approach to better protect artists in their contractual dealings, addressing the challenges posed by the rapidly changing digital environment.

Following the presentation, Prof. Giuseppe Mazziotti (Abreu Professor in Law and Innovation and Fair MusE’s Principal Investigator and Coordinator) and Margarida Castillo Silva (Intellectual Property Lawyer at Abreu Advogados) led an engaging Q&A session with the audience. The discussion covered a range of compelling topics, including the transparency obligations of music exploiters towards creators, the contrasting approaches to artists’ rights between Europe and North America, and the potential of collective bargaining to reshape the industry.

A focal point of the discussion was the EU Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790, which echoes many of the themes explored in Prof. Vanherpe’s book and aligns closely with Fair MusE’s ongoing research in Work Package 2, “Assessing the Role of Regulation,” led by Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

“This event not only celebrated the launch of a significant academic contribution by a very talented scholar but also fostered a critical dialogue on the future of music contracts in a platform-dominated digital economy. The exploitation of musical works and sound recordings by streaming services and social media raises dilemmas about how to estimate the value of human creativity and share the revenues generated by these exploitations in a more transparent and, thus, fairer way,” emphasised Prof. Mazziotti. “On this front, Prof. Vanherpe’s volume helps advance Fair MusE’s mission by offering an in-depth analysis of copyright contract law in European jurisdictions where the protection of authors and performers is taken very seriously.”