“Music Creators’ Rights under EU Law”: Fair MusE Publishes Preliminary Results from a Comprehensive EU Copyright Study

Fair MusE has published a slide set summarising key findings of the study on how EU copyright law is evolving to protect music creators’ rights, offering critical insights into transparency, remuneration, and data governance across Europe’s digital music ecosystem.

The Fair MusE project has recently released a comprehensive summary highlighting the main findings from its latest study—“Music Creators’ Rights under EU Law”—submitted to the European Commission on 28 February 2025. The study, authored by Prof. Giuseppe Mazziotti with the support of Jasmin Leuendorf and other members of his team at Catolica Global School of Law in Lisbon, details critical insights into EU copyright-focused tasks undertaken as part of the project’s Work Package 2 (“Assessing the Role of Regulation”).

The study provides an in-depth critical review of a rapidly evolving cluster of regulations introduced at the EU level with the purpose of modernising authors’, performers’ and record producers’ rights in the digital economy. This deliverable analyses EU copyright directives and their national transpositions in ten different EU Member States on the grounds of desk research and empirical investigations Fair MusE’s teams at Catolica, the University of Tartu and Central European University conducted through interviews with dozens of industry experts and stakeholders in the music and tech sectors.

These investigations focus on pressing policy and business issues emerging from the EU’s legislative attempts to foster transparency of music copyright’s exploitation as a way to enhance sustainability and fairness of music ‘creation’, broadly defined.

These issues include:

• The scope and effectiveness of copyright contract law provisions made mandatory for all EU Member States under Chapter 3 of Directive 2019/790. These are pan-European rules aimed to protect composers and performers by granting them rights to data transparency, contractual adjustments and revocation of rights transfers for the ultimate purpose to gain appropriate and proportionate remuneration from the exploitation of their works.
• The technical, legal and economic consequences of the enhanced copyright liability regime established under Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 for social media services. The study reviews the national transpositions of this provision in 10 EU member states (Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Germany, Estonia, Denmark and Greece), assessing their effective impact on social media’s licensing of music publishing and recording rights after a long era of “platform neutrality” (and “irresponsibility”).
• Persisting challenges caused by unprecedented fragmentation of repertoires and licensing entities in the collective management of music composers’ and publishers’ rights. The study assesses the impact of multi-territorial licences for online music exploitations, identifying pros and cons of the tight requirements ( also known as “Passport” system) that Directive 2014/26 mandates for collecting societies wishing to offer these services.
• The central role played by proprietary data and metadata infrastructures for the remuneration of distinct right-holders in the music publishing and recording sectors. The study highlights the difficulties and data misalignments that still characterise the ‘vertical’ relationship between standardised information regarding sound recordings (identified by ISRCs) and the underlying – but often “forgotten” – musical compositions (identified by ISWCs). In doing so, the study emphasises the antagonistic relationship that materialised between the music industry’s datasets and those produced and relied upon by online exploiters, especially in the social media industry.

A PowerPoint slideset, now featured in the “Resources” section of this website, streamlines and makes the study’s research findings accessible to the public until its open access publication.

The finalisation of this study and the submission of other deliverables by Fair MusE’s economics and data science hubs in February 2025 marked a key milestone in the project’s research efforts and the conclusion of its second year.

Building on the valuable insights gained over the first 24 months, the project’s interdisciplinary research efforts are currently aimed at producing its final outcomes, namely: (i) a music copyright data infrastructure; (ii) a music data dashboard; (iii) a score aimed at ranking music platforms’ fairness; and (iv) a ‘White Paper’ providing policy recommendations for a fairer European digital music ecosystem.

Download the slideset here.

*Photo by Blaz Erzetic