Sittings · Document
Follow up to the European Parliament non-legislative resolution on cultural diversity and the conditions for authors in the European music streaming market
Rapporteur: Ibán GARCÍA DEL BLANCO (S&D / ES)
Reference numbers: 2023/2054 (INI) / A9-0388/2023 / P9_TA(2024)0020
Date of adoption of the resolution: 17 January 2024
Competent Parliamentary Committee: Committee on Culture and Education (CULT)
Brief analysis/ assessment of the resolution and requests made in it:
The resolution on cultural diversity and the conditions for authors in the European music streaming market draws attention to persisting concerns for authors and performers in the music streaming market: (1) the sustainability of the music ecosystem for authors, (2) the prominence and discoverability of European musical works, and (3) the ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI). The calls to the Commission, the Member States and the sector are balanced and demonstrate a sound understanding of how complex the music ecosystem is.
The Commission has been addressing several of the issues mentioned, as part of its work on the regulatory side, the funding side and, more broadly in the context of the Music Moves Europe initiative. Music Moves Europe is the Commission’s umbrella initiative dedicated to music. In order to build a European music ecosystem that is creative, diverse and competitive, Music Moves Europe revolves around the following six strategic priorities:
Stimulate and accompany the digital transition of the sector;
Stimulate and accompany the green transition and environmental sustainability of the sector;
Promote European music diversity and inclusion;
Encourage fair remuneration of artists, and improve other working conditions;
Improve data about the music sector;
Support the cross-border mobility of artists, especially emerging artists, and the circulation of repertoire within and beyond Europe.
Music Moves Europe acts along four strands of action through EU funding to projects, policy support and cooperation with the EU Member States, a structured dialogue with the sector, and the fostering of a favourable regulatory environment. In addition, the Commission highlights and promotes the diversity of the European music repertoire with a European Union Prize for popular and contemporary music: the Music Moves Awards. Several concrete initiatives are currently ongoing, including an EU study to identify support measures to promote the discoverability of European content online and investigate the impact of current curation practices and AI in this field.
The resolution was adopted in good time as the music sector is currently at a critical juncture with the streaming market undergoing several reforms initiated by major industry actors (major music streaming players like Spotify and Deezer, as well as Universal Music Group). This is echoed by the ongoing reflection on the working conditions of artists which was also addressed in the Parliament resolution (2023/2051(INL)) “An EU framework for the social and professional situation of artists and workers in the creative and cultural sectors”.
Response to the requests and overview of the action taken, or intended to be taken, by the Commission:
Fair remuneration of creators for the exploitation of artistic work
With reference to calls to the Commission to assess the impact of existing contractual practices and to explore appropriate measures (paragraph 4), the Commission would like to clarify that it has already taken action. The principle of appropriate and proportionate remuneration, enshrined in Article 18 of Directive (EU) 2019/790, aims at ensuring that authors and performers receive appropriate and proportionate remuneration when they licence or transfer their rights for the exploitation of their works and performances. In the music sector, this principle applies in situations where authors and performers transfer or license their rights to record labels that have contractual arrangements with music streaming service providers. Article 18 leaves a large margin of discretion to the Member States to implement the principle of appropriate and proportionate remuneration through different mechanisms, considering the principle of contractual freedom and a fair balance of rights and interests. The Commission launched in January 2024 a study on contractual practices affecting the transfer of copyright and related rights and the creators and producers’ ability to exploit their rights. While the study does not focus on the music streaming market, it will analyse the development of contractual practices affecting music composers.
Regarding to the call to the Commission to monitor and encourage progress to overcome the current imbalances (paragraph 5), the Commission closely monitors market developments affecting the remuneration of authors and performers in the music sector, notably through conformity assessments of the remuneration chapter of the Digital Single Market Directive. The Commission will actively engage with relevant stakeholders to evaluate whether additional measures are needed to ensure that authors and performers receive fair remuneration for the exploitation of their works or performances.
Towards a sustainable ecosystem for authors
With reference to the call to evaluate the use of new technologies in relation to their potential to improve transparency and cost efficiency within the streaming market (paragraph 7), the Commission published in 2022 a study on Copyright and new technologies, which looked into the challenges of copyright-related metadata (such as identifiers) and rights management in various European creative sectors, as well as the potential use of new technologies, including blockchain, to improve the identification of copyright protected content online. Moreover, in 2023, the Commission launched calls for expression of interest in setting up European Digital Infrastructure Consortia (EDIC). These Member States-led initiatives are a new implementation mechanism for multi-country projects, first introduced in Decision (EU) 2022/2481 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 establishing the Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030. A task force has been set up by several Member States to work on developing a copyright infrastructure based on blockchain. With the results of the above-mentioned workstreams, the Commission will assess the need for further analysis and action to enhance the identification of copyrighted content online and the accuracy of metadata.
With reference to the need to support projects raising awareness of the importance of accurately getting credited and paid among authors (paragraph 11), the Commission would like to report that the Horizon Europe programme provides support, through the call for proposals “Towards a competitive, fair and sustainable European music ecosystem” and in line with the Music Moves Europe initiative, to research and innovation projects that generate new knowledge and data relating to the music ecosystem. Three projects have been awarded grants (EUR 3 million each, with a 3-year duration).
First, the Open Music Europe project has the ambition to build an open, scalable data-to-policy pipeline for European Music Ecosystems. It will support the music industry through identifying cases in which music industry professionals are compensated fairly compared to the benefits of music, and cases of negative biases and discrimination. The project also seeks to ensure the use of big data in the music sector and the way algorithms recommend music remain fair and accountable for everyone.
Second, the Fair MusE project’s main objective is to understand and promote fairness for music creators and stakeholders across digital music platforms, which include both digital music services and social media.
Third, the Music 360 project will provide a comprehensive perspective on the value of music by addressing the need for a fair distribution mechanism of authors’ and neighbouring rights based on a method to estimate the value of music to be used to motivate fair compensation.
The music ecosystem was also addressed by the Horizon 2020-funded project Repertorium that researched and encouraged the promulgation of European repertory through technologies operating on records interrelated utilising machines.
In addition, the Commission welcomes initiatives such as the Creators Learn Intellectual Property (CLIP), recently launched by the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the Music Rights Awareness Foundation, which seeks to raise creators’ awareness of intellectual property rights and related management practices for appropriate recognition and fair reward for their work. The initiative has been promoted on CreativesUnite, the EU-co-funded platform that disseminates the initiatives from cultural networks supported through the Creative Europe and information relevant to their work.
The Commission agrees with the need to implement the Digital Market Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) to ensure fair competition between online content sharing platforms and music streaming service providers (paragraph 13). The DSA contributes to creating a safe and trustworthy online environment. It provides rules for online intermediaries to prevent the spread of illegal content, including copyright-infringing content. The DMA aims at increasing transparency and fairness for business users dependent on ‘gatekeepers’, which are large digital platforms providing core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messenger services. The regulation protects contestability in digital markets by prohibiting ‘gatekeepers’ from engaging in certain unfair practices. The DSA came into effect end August 2023 for the first set of designated very large online platforms and search engines. Regarding the DMA, designated ‘gatekeepers’ had to comply with its requirements by 7 March 2024. The co-legislators have entrusted the Commission with supervisory powers with regard to these designated entities (i.e. gatekeepers under the DMA and very large online platforms and search engines under the DSA). The Commission is committed to playing its role of enforcer of the new rules and has already initiated several non-compliance cases against platforms under both the DSA and the DMA.
With reference to “the provision of appropriate funding instruments to boost investment” (paragraph 14), the Commission is addressing the issue of investment in and funding to the music ecosystem through different EU funding instruments, and more generally under the Music Moves Europe initiative (MME). Within the framework of the MME structured dialogue, the Commission organised an EU conference on music in Brussels on 22 February 2024, a session of which focused on the financial stability of Europe’s music ecosystem. The Commission already provides financial support through EU programmes such as Creative Europe, Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and InvestEU.
Prominence and discoverability of European musical works
With reference to calls addressed to the Commission to take up action on the prominence and discoverability of European musical works (paragraphs 17 to 20), the Commission reiterates that safeguarding cultural diversity is a key value to all the Member States and European institutions and one of the pillars in EU and national policymaking in the field of culture. The EU has undertaken numerous policy interventions and initiatives to promote cultural diversity including in the digital environment. More specifically, the Commission, in line with the current EU Work Plan for Culture 2023-2026 is about to launch a study to identify support measures to promote the discoverability of European content online and investigate the impact of current curation practices and artificial intelligence in this field. The study will cover the music sector, among others. This is a first step to assess potential needs in terms of policy action to promote exposure to cultural and linguistic diversity.
With reference to the data collection (paragraph 21), the Commission already disseminates a wide range of official statistics related to the cultural sectors. The data are compiled from several sources in the areas of social and business statistics, for which the data collection is at the level of Member States. The domain of music streaming services is currently not covered by the EU official statistics. Experimental analyses in the framework of EU funded projects have provided initial insights into the matter, with the use of limited information publicly available from the streaming platforms. Nevertheless, a comprehensive analysis of the sector would require access to the data held by private companies providing the streaming services.
With reference to “the preservation of the digital European musical heritage” (paragraph 22), the Commission currently funds two Horizon Europe projects that are of relevance. First, the Polifonia project implements a digital ecosystem for European musical heritage. The project recreates the connections between music, people, places and events from the sixteenth century to the modern day. The findings will be available in a global database on the web and enhance the understanding of European musical heritage. The aim is to provoke a paradigm shift in musical heritage preservation, management, studying, interaction, and exploitation. Secondly, the Repertorium project develops AI tools to automatically digitise and catalogue neumatic and classical manuscripts and preserve and make European musical heritage accessible through sophisticated linked data models. Moreover, it creates state-of-the-art sound processing technologies that will enable real-time, low-cost and metaverse-ready immersive audio streaming.
Towards the ethical use of AI
With reference to “transparency needs and compliance with Union legal requirements when using AI” (paragraph 23), the political agreement on the proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI Act) supports the objective of the Union of being a global leader in the development of secure, trustworthy and ethical artificial intelligence in all sectors, including the cultural and creative sectors. The Commission shares the need to ensure an effective compliance with the relevant Union legislation concerning the protection of the rights of authors and other rightsholders. The EU copyright legislation sets a clear framework for when copyright protected content can be used and the 2019 Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market includes provisions to balance interests in relation to text and data mining by determining when rightsholders can opt out and reserve their rights. However, the enforcement of the opt out and the copyright protection remain a challenge, especially with the large AI models. In this context, the AI Act includes targeted provisions to facilitate the compliance with existing Union copyright legislation, by imposing transparency requirements on the providers of general-purpose AI models towards downstream integrators of their models. The requirements include the obligation to share a detailed summary of the content used for training the general-purpose model, in order to facilitate parties with legitimate interests, including copyright holders, to exercise and enforce their rights under Union law, while taking due account of the need to protect trade secrets and confidential information of businesses. It also includes the obligation to put in place policy to ensure compliance with Union copyright law, including to respect the reservations of rights expressed by right holders in relation to text and data mining.
With reference to calls to the Commission to propose legal targeted provisions to ensure the transparency of the algorithms and content recommendation with a view to preventing unfair practices and streaming fraud (paragraph 24), following the political agreement on the AI Act, any provider of AI systems generating synthetic content, including audio content, will have to design these systems in a way that synthetic content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated. Furthermore, in the area of recommender systems, the DSA and the DMA are also expected to contribute to the objective of transparency in relation to exposure to cultural content online when content is disseminated by online platforms acting as intermediaries. The DSA applies to online intermediaries, such as user-uploaded content services, and imposes transparency obligations for the recommender systems of online platforms. Besides, very large online platforms will have to assess and mitigate systemic risks on their services, including foreseeable negative effects for the freedom and pluralism of the media. The DMA, among others, includes new obligations for designated gatekeepers on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access, as well as the prohibition of self-preferencing.
Perspectives
With reference to the call to set up a European Music Observatory (paragraph 28), the Commission published a study entitled “Feasibility study for the establishment of a European Music Observatory” in 2020, as part of the Music Moves Europe Preparatory Action 2018-2020. As a concrete follow up of the Feasibility study for a European Music Observatory (EMO), the Commission explored one of the options identified in the study to integrate certain tasks of an EMO into the existing Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights (EUIPO) that already does specific work on copyright intensive industries, such as music. As one of the first results, the 2022 Work Programme of the EUIPO Observatory contained several music-sector specific references into planned economic studies for 2022 as well as into planned awareness raising activities.
The Commission also published in 2022 the “Measuring the Cultural and Creative Sectors in EU report”, which proposed an updated framework for cultural statistics to provide better measuring of cultural and creative sectors, including music. A specific section of the report proposed and tested a first ever methodology to measure music digital services. As a follow-up to this report, Eurostat created a dedicated Task Force composed of Member States’ cultural statistics experts that works to define the new EU cultural statistics to be implemented from 2025. The Task Force’s work specifically includes the enhancement of statistical measurement of cultural sub-sectors, including the music sector.
Regrading the improvement of the Creative Europe programme (paragraph 29), following the implementation of the EUR 7 million Preparatory action on music 2018-2020, the Commission has strengthened its targeted support to music in the Creative Europe programme 2021-2027, under the Music Moves Europe initiative. Two specific calls dedicated to music were launched in 2021-2022, and another sectorial call will be launched in 2024. This comes in addition to funding allocated to the music sector through the horizontal actions under the cultural strand of Creative Europe, namely EUR 100 million in 2014-2020 and EUR 52 million in 2021-2022. Furthermore, music-related projects continue to benefit also from the cross-sectoral strand and related actions (e.g. the Innovation lab). Regarding the future, reflections have started within the Commission to prepare for the new Multiannual Financial Framework and the new generation of EU programmes, including the future of the Creative Europe programme. The sectoral support for music is part of these reflections.
With reference to the need to develop a comprehensive European export strategy on European musical works (paragraph 30), the Commission published two studies as part of the Music Moves Europe Preparatory Action 2018-2020. First, the study on “A European Music Export Strategy” was published in 2019 and proposed a set of measures. The study formulates a proposal for the articulation and the implementation of a European music export strategy, with key expected results in terms of market structuration, policy developments, data collection and cross-border circulation of European music. Secondly, the “Implementing steps to develop and promote European music export” study was published in 2023 and presented the results of pilot projects successfully implemented to test the ideas put forward in the previous study. The study’s findings informed the design of LiveMX, a EUR 4 million project launched in 2023 as a Music Moves Europe action in Creative Europe. This project aims to help music organisations and professionals to develop and strengthen their skills, abilities, processes and resources to adapt and thrive in such a dynamic industry. The project features a music export priority that addresses three challenges: developing music export; promoting new music and artists abroad in innovative ways; and developing professional networks and understanding of new markets.
The Commission would also like to point out that it supports the European Music Export Exchange (EMEE) under the network scheme in Creative Europe. EMEE is a non-profit association, which pulls together a mix of public and private funding to support European musicians, music companies and music professionals in their export strategies.
The Commission funds projects that promote European musical works across borders, such as the ESNS exchange (formerly known as the European Talent Exchange Programme), a programme which aims to stimulate the circulation of European music repertoire on festivals, radio as well as in the media in Europe, and run by Eurosonic Noorderslag. Within the framework of the structured dialogue with the European music ecosystem, the Commission held a session in November 2023 entitled “Accelerating the players of tomorrow’s European music ecosystem” which precisely addressed also export-related questions. In addition, support to music export was covered in the discussions of the EU conference on music, organised by the Commission on 22 February in Brussels.
With reference to the establishment of a structured dialogue between all stakeholders (paragraph 31), the Commission launched a new dialogue with the music sector in 2023. The objective is to identify key takeaway messages and policy recommendations from the dialogue sessions and to exchange with policy makers and EU institutions in a second step. The structured dialogue with the music sector aims to raise awareness on the specific needs of the sector and to identify possible fields of future EU action with a clear European added value. In the context of this dialogue, over 4 years, 10 dialogue sessions will be organised at existing European music conferences and 2 EU level conferences will take place in Brussels. The first EU conference took place on 22 February 2024 in Brussels (see footnote 14).
With reference to the invitation addressed to the Commission to consider introducing a European industrial strategy for music (paragraph 32), the Commission would like to emphasise ongoing work related to the cultural and creative sectors and industries ecosystem. The EU Industrial strategy adopted in March 2020 recognises the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) as one of EU’s 14 industrial ecosystems. The Creative Europe programme is the only EU programme providing targeted support to the cultural and creative sectors, and music features more prominently in the programme, notably following the successful Music Moves Europe Preparatory Action 2018-2020. The music sector is also supported through the “culture” strand of Creative Europe, as well as under other EU programmes and funds such as Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and InvestEU.
Projects and initiatives referred to above provide information about options to better mainstream the needs of the music sector into other EU policies, as well as to better tap into its potential to contribute to growth, jobs, innovation and well-being. The European music sector is indeed the second music market worldwide, with a total gross value-added contribution to GDP that amounted to EUR 81.9 billion in 2018 and 2 million employed in the sector the same year (based on data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).