Promoting Fairness of the Music Ecosystem in a Platform-Dominated and Post-Pandemic Europe

The overarching goal of Fair MusE is to promote fairness for music creators and stakeholders from an interdisciplinary perspective, thus leading to a more transparent, competitive and sustainable music ecosystem in Europe. Fair MusE focuses specifically on the domination of online platforms and their algorithms and will investigate: (i) the legal responses that have been proposed in the EU; (ii) the changes these platforms have brought to the music industry and music professionals; and (iii) the impact of such algorithms on music consumption. Fair MusE will provide an interdisciplinary analysis of fairness in the music industry involving music creators and stakeholders in the research; promote and enhance transparency concerning music industry practices and standardisation in data collection in the European music ecosystem; and assess the risks created by the reinforced dominance of the largest online platforms prompted by COVID 19 as well as making policymakers, stakeholders and the general public aware of such risks. To do so, Fair MusE will provide an innovative, strong and future-proof set of co-created responses and solutions: the 'Music Copyright Infrastructure', a data-sharing model agreement enhancing transparency; a 'Music Data Dashboard' of statistical indicators on the economic and societal value of the European music sector; the 'Fairness Score', a tool to assess music services and social media in terms of fairness’ multiple facets; and a ‘White Paper’ embodying policy recommendations to enhance competitiveness, sustainability, transparency and fairness of the EU music ecosystem. Our consortium is a carefully designed interdisciplinary group of academic and industry partners with strong expertise in the fields of law, economics, political science and computer science, supported by an Advisory Board composed of a highly qualified and broadly representative group of industry experts.