Fair MusE launches "Digital Rights Awareness", an e-learning series on music, platforms, and creators' rights

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.

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.

Digital Rights Awareness is intended for musicians, rights-holders, policymakers, 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 on the Fair MusE website and via Fair MusE's YouTube channel and can be followed episode by episode.

Credits:

Cover image: Photo by cottonbro studio

Contacts:

Coordinator: UCP, Giuseppe Mazziotti, gmazziotti@ucp.pt

Communication officer: ICONS, Cesar G. Crisosto, cesar.crisosto@icons.it

Website: https://fairmuse.eu/—LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fair-muse-project/

Provided by iCube Programme