Three Years Later, Fairness Remains Elusive… But No Longer Undefined

After three years of research into the inner workings of Europe’s digital music economy, the project releases its final video. Not as a celebration, but as a reckoning. Streaming has transformed how music travels across borders and devices. Yet beneath its seamless surface lies a system still shaped by opacity, fragmented data, and structural imbalances that few can clearly see, and even fewer can challenge. Fair MusE’s last message is simple, and unsettling: fairness in digital music remains far away. But it is no longer invisible.

Today, Fair MusE ends, and it ends the way it lived: not with a neat conclusion, but with a question that refuses to go away.

For three years, the project has explored what many people in the music world feel instinctively but struggle to prove: that the digital music economy can sound modern and open, while remaining structurally unbalanced. Streaming made music more accessible than ever. Yet behind the convenience of the playlist sits a market shaped by opaque data flows, unequal bargaining power, and rules that are often clearer to platforms than to the people whose work fuels them.

Fair MusE’s final video is the project’s closing chapter, but it does not feel like an ending. It feels like a hand placed on the door, holding it open.

The video brings together four voices who carried the project’s core questions across disciplines and across the sometimes uncomfortable boundary between research and real-world practice:

• Giuseppe Mazziotti, Project Coordinator and Principal Investigator;
• Heritiana Ranaivoson, Research Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel;
• Daniel Bedoya, Postdoc Researcher at Université de Lille
• Jannick Kirk Sørensen, Associate Professor at Aalborg Universitet

Their conversation is not staged as a victory lap. It is measured, honest, and quietly urgent, the tone of people who know that knowledge matters only when it can travel.

What the viewer encounters is not a recap of “what we did”. It is a story of how a problem becomes visible.

At the beginning, the challenge sounds almost simple: how can a system be fair if the people inside it cannot see how it works? In music streaming, value moves at speed. Songs are played, counted, recommended, rewarded, sometimes millions of times a day. But the logic behind those movements often remains hidden behind proprietary infrastructures and fragmented information. Creators, managers and even some rightsholders are left navigating a world where the most decisive elements are frequently non-transparent: which data is collected, which metadata is trusted, how works are matched to their owners, how money is distributed, and how visibility is shaped by algorithmic systems that feel like weather, everywhere, influential, and rarely accountable.

This is where Fair MusE makes its most important move. It does not treat opacity as a minor flaw or a communication problem. It approaches it as a structural condition, a feature of platform-dominated markets, not a bug that can be patched with goodwill. When transparency becomes optional, fairness becomes negotiable. And when fairness becomes negotiable, it tends to drift away from those with the least leverage.

The video’s strength comes from how it builds this argument without turning it into a lecture. The interviewees speak plainly, but with the precision of people who have spent years testing assumptions and confronting the limits of what can be measured. They return, again and again, to the same centre of gravity: data, who has it, who controls it, who can use it, who can challenge it, and who is excluded from it.

In the Fair MusE story, data is not a cold technical subject. Data becomes the stage on which fairness is decided. Metadata becomes more than administrative detail; it becomes infrastructure for rights, remuneration and recognition. If metadata is incomplete, inconsistent or poorly governed, then attribution fails, payments misalign, and accountability dissolves. In that world, even the most principled policy ambition can collapse into ambiguity: you cannot fix what you cannot trace.

And yet the final video is not simply an indictment. It is, above all, a demonstration of what happens when critique is treated as a starting point, not a destination.

Across the conversation, the project’s outputs emerge in the way solutions should: not as a list of deliverables, but as responses to real obstacles the researchers encountered. Fair MusE moved towards concrete pathways, tools and proposals designed to make fairness less rhetorical and more operational. The video highlights how the project progressed from mapping asymmetries to building instruments that can help stakeholders see, compare and act.

That is the deeper meaning of this final production: it is a synthesis, yes, but it is also a translation. It takes three years of interdisciplinary work and turns it into something that can travel beyond project circles, beyond specialised communities, and into the spaces where rules are shaped.

In the video, fairness is not described as a distant ideal. It is treated as something that can be measured, tested, and debated with evidence. This is where the Fairness Score, the Dashboard, the Metadata Infrastructure proposal and the policy recommendations gain their real force: they do not claim to solve everything; they claim something more useful. They claim that Europe can do better, and that “better” can be defined, tracked and argued for.

There is also an emotional current running through the film: the acknowledgement that working across disciplines is slow, difficult, and occasionally frustrating, and that it is still the only serious way forward. Law alone cannot fix what data infrastructure does not support. Data alone cannot decide what fairness should mean. Consumer research alone cannot address market power. The value of Fair MusE lies in how it brought these perspectives into contact, not to create a perfect consensus, but to create a shared frame strong enough to hold disagreement without collapsing.

That matters because the stakes are expanding. Music streaming sits inside wider European debates that now shape everyday life: transparency in digital markets, accountability of platforms, cultural diversity online, and the growing role of AI in curating what people see, hear and discover. The video positions Fair MusE exactly where it belongs: inside those debates, not alongside them. It makes the case that fairness in streaming is not a niche concern for the music sector. It is a test case for the platform economy itself: a place where culture, technology, governance and human livelihoods meet.

And then, quietly, comes the tension that gives this final piece its power.

The project ends today. But the distance to fairness remains.

There is no triumphal ending here, because the story is not resolved. The mechanisms that produce unfairness (opacity, fragmentation, asymmetry, concentration) are not removed by research alone. They require political will, coordination, and the courage to treat infrastructure as policy. They require standards that can be implemented, governance that can be enforced, and transparency that is not voluntary.

In that sense, Fair MusE’s final video is not a goodbye. It is a handover.

It hands over evidence. It hands over frameworks. It hands over language precise enough to cut through the fog. It hands over a set of tools that make it harder to pretend the problem is unknowable and easier to imagine what a fairer digital music ecosystem could look like.

If there is a final message in this last release, it is this: fairness is still far away, but it is no longer undefined.

And sometimes, in systems built on invisibility, that is how change begins: with a light switched on, and a refusal to switch it off again.

*Photo by Pixabay