Fair MusE launches “Digital Rights Awareness”, an e-learning series on music, platforms, and creators’ rights, with two public webinars
From vinyl records to streaming platforms, and from playlists to artificial intelligence, the way music is created, distributed, and valued has changed dramatically over the past decades. To help creators, professionals, and the wider public make sense of this transformation, the Fair MusE project is launching Digital Rights Awareness, a new eight-episode e-learning course that explores how music rights are shaped in today’s digital ecosystem.
From vinyl records to streaming platforms, and from playlists to artificial intelligence, the way music is created, distributed, and valued has changed dramatically over the past decades. To help creators, professionals, and the wider public make sense of this transformation, the Fair MusE project is launching Digital Rights Awareness, a new eight-episode e-learning course that offers a clear and accessible journey through the legal, economic, and technological shifts that have reshaped the digital music ecosystem.
The course is authored by Dr. Giuseppe Mazziotti, Coordinator and Principal Investigator of the Fair MusE project. Across eight episodes, Digital Rights Awareness explores how authors’ rights historically emerged, how copyright is structured across international, European, and national layers, and how platforms, algorithms, collective management, licensing models, and metadata systems shape today’s music economy. The series also tackles two of the most pressing challenges facing the sector: the role of data in fair remuneration and the impact of generative artificial intelligence on creativity and copyright.
Rather than presenting these issues as isolated topics, the series is built as a continuous narrative that follows the evolution of music and its regulation over time. It shows how every technological shift, from sound recordings to social media and AI, forces the law to adapt, and how questions of access, visibility, remuneration, and fairness remain deeply interconnected. The course reflects the core research of the Fair MusE project, which studies how platforms and algorithms influence not only the music economy, but also cultural diversity and the working conditions of creators.
To mark the launch of the series, Fair MusE is organising two public webinars. The first webinar will take place on Thursday 26 February at 14:00 CET and will feature Maria-José Schmidt-Kessen (Central European University) as a guest. It will focus on Episodes 1 to 4, covering the historical evolution of authors’ rights, the structure of music rights, the rise of platforms as gatekeepers, and the role of European and national regulators.
The second webinar will take place on Friday 27 February at 16:00 CET and will feature Allen Bargfrede (Avance Advisors) as a guest. This session will focus on Episodes 5 to 8, addressing collective management, licensing models, data and metadata, and the challenges raised by generative artificial intelligence. Giuseppe Mazziotti will be the main speaker in both webinars. More information on the webinars can be found here.
Digital Rights Awareness is intended for musicians, rights-holders, policy-makers, students, journalists, and anyone interested in understanding how the digital music ecosystem really works. By combining legal analysis with concrete examples from today’s platform-driven market, the series aims to make complex issues understandable without oversimplifying them, and to support a more informed public debate on the future of music and creators’ rights in Europe and beyond.
The full e-learning series is now available here and can be followed episode by episode.
*Photo by cottonbro studio
