Award-winning Fair MusE project releases new video on the future of music fairness

Recorded during the final event of in Brussels, a newly released video featuring project coordinator Giuseppe Mazziotti and Silvia Ielmini reflects on the project’s mission to bring greater fairness and transparency to Europe’s digital music ecosystem. Produced as part of the prize awarded to Fair MusE after winning the .eu Web Awards, the video revisits the project’s key achievements while opening a wider conversation on the future of music streaming, creators’ rights, and the sustainability of artistic creation in the platform era.

What does fairness sound like in the age of music streaming? For the partners behind , it sounds like a music ecosystem where artists can create, share, and reach audiences without losing control over their rights, visibility, and sustainability along the way.

These reflections are at the centre of a newly released video featuring Giuseppe Mazziotti and Silvia Ielmini, recorded during the project’s final event in Brussels on 18 February. Produced as part of the prize awarded to the project after winning the .eu Web Awards, the video offers a concise but powerful reflection on the challenges currently shaping Europe’s digital music landscape and on the legacy Fair MusE hopes to leave behind.

Over the last years, Fair MusE has explored a question that increasingly affects artists, creators, platforms, policymakers, and audiences alike: who truly benefits from the digital transformation of music?

Streaming platforms have radically changed the way music is discovered and consumed. They have opened unprecedented opportunities for creators to reach global audiences, while at the same time raising new concerns around transparency, remuneration, visibility, algorithmic recommendation systems, and bargaining power within the industry. Fair MusE set out to investigate these tensions by combining legal, technological, economic, and policy research with practical tools capable of supporting a fairer ecosystem.

“I think the essence of the Fair MusE project is to tackle something completely untackled,” says Ielmini in the video. “Fairness and transparency within the music ecosystem.”

One of the strongest ideas emerging from the interview is the project’s vision of success for artists. Rather than focusing exclusively on the global superstar model, Fair MusE advocates for an ecosystem where musicians and creators can sustainably thrive across different scales and audiences.

“It is an ecosystem where artists can thrive without necessarily becoming stars,” Mazziotti explains.

The video also highlights several of the project’s flagship results, including the Fairness Score, an innovative framework designed to help assess how fair streaming platforms are towards artists and creators. By identifying parameters linked to transparency, rights management, and platform practices, the tool aims to provide greater awareness of how digital services operate and how their business models may impact creators.

Alongside the Fairness Score, the video references a broader ecosystem of tools and outputs developed throughout the project: the Music Data Dashboard, the Data Loader Toolkit, the Music Copyright Infrastructure, policy recommendations, thematic publications, and the project’s White Paper. Together, these results have been consolidated into a final sustainability plan intended to ensure that Fair MusE’s work remains accessible and relevant beyond the end of the project.

The video arrives as a fitting reflection of a project that consistently sought to bridge research, policy, technology, and public debate. Throughout its lifetime, Fair MusE investigated the structural dynamics of the digital music sector, and opened discussions on how Europe can safeguard cultural diversity, artistic sustainability, and fair digital practices in an industry increasingly shaped by data and platform economies.

As highlighted in the closing moments of the interview, the project’s message goes well beyond music alone. It is also a call for European institutions to remain actively engaged with fast-evolving digital industries, ensuring that regulation keeps pace with technological transformation and continues protecting creators in increasingly complex online environments.

“If institutions do not get involved properly,” Mazziotti warns in the video, “the risk is to lose bargaining power and the sustainability of creation.”

More than a closing reflection, the new video stands as a reminder of the broader conversation Fair MusE has helped bring to the forefront: how to ensure that the future of digital music remains not only innovative, but also fair.