ABSTRACT
Between July and October 2025, Fair MusE carried out an intensive Task Force exercise under Work Package 5 of its three-year research programme into music repertoire data asymmetries, licensing practices, and creators’ rights to fair remuneration in the European music ecosystem. The Task Force brought together 35 senior external experts drawn from international and European music industry associations, collective management and performers’ organisations, independent legal and technical contributors, technology and data-driven music services, academic institutions, and one public authority, with broad geographical coverage across at least ten EU Member States.
The Task Force was mandated to contribute to the design of a Music Copyright Infrastructure — a law-and-technology concept aimed at supporting reliable, standardised, and interoperable metadata and rights information across the European digital music industry’s value chain. Its work built on the findings of Fair MusE’s comparative EU copyright study Music Creators’ Rights under EU Law (D2.2), which identified the institutional, legal and technological conditions shaping music-related rights and their management across the EU. Through three thematic roundtables and multiple specialised meetings held under the Chatham House Rule, the Task Force explored three key thematic clusters: the integration of music publishing and recording metadata; the impact of Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on social media platforms’ data infrastructures and industry standards such as DDEX; and possible contractual and organisational architectures for data-sharing models that balance commercial confidentiality with interoperability.
The consultations revealed both persistent structural challenges and emerging common ground among stakeholders. The resulting Deliverable (D5.1) is structured as follows. Section 2 situates the Task Force’s mandate within the historical and contemporary architecture of European music licensing, explaining how repertoire data systems generate structural information asymmetries across musical compositions, sound recordings, and performances. Section 3 presents the diagnostic findings of the roundtables and interviews, organising the insights into three analytical dimensions: current music data flows and flaws; the historical roots of fragmentation; and its economic consequences. Section 4 proposes a conceptual architecture for a European Music Metadata Infrastructure (EMMI), outlining design objectives, a governance structure, and a phased implementation pathway, with particular attention to the 2023 UK Music Metadata Agreement as a credible model for a multi-stakeholder, supervised EU data-sharing framework.
Mazziotti, Giuseppe, Music Copyright Infrastructure (December 31, 2025).
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