5  What Europe Should Do Next for Music Data & AI

Europe’s music ecosystem is under pressure. Streaming pays in micro-royalties, metadata mistakes cost real money, and AI threatens to overwhelm platforms with untracked content. But solutions are within reach. This Green Paper sets out a path forward, built on three pillars: better metadata, shared data spaces, and AI that works for everyone.

Together, these pillars correspond to the three operational layers of a modern copyright infrastructure: semantic interoperability (identifiers and rights metadata), operational workflows (registration, reconciliation, and documentation), and organisational governance across institutions (see Chapter 1 for the background and policy context). These priorities align closely with the emerging framework proposed by CITF: trusted identifiers, lifecycle-aware provenance, and interoperable, federated rights metadata.

European law and policy already implicitly require these layers to function together. The EU framework on data governance, copyright, and artificial intelligence assumes that rights-relevant data can circulate across systems in a trustworthy, auditable, and interoperable manner. In practice, this means that metadata, workflows, and governance are not separable domains, but interdependent conditions for lawful reuse, fair remuneration, and compliant AI systems.

The evidence presented in this Green Paper suggests that the primary challenge for European music data policy is no longer the absence of conceptual frameworks or technical standards, but the limited scaling and coordination of solutions that already exist and have been partially implemented. As a result, existing legal rights (attribution, remuneration, reuse) and regulatory frameworks (AI Act, GDPR, data spaces) cannot be effectively enforced in practice, because the underlying data conditions required for their operation are missing or inconsistent. Future European action should therefore prioritise the consolidation, federation, and long-term governance of proven approaches, rather than the repeated creation of new pilot structures detached from policy and institutional contexts.

In this respect, the Open Music Observatory and related national implementations should be understood as operational components of an evolving European copyright infrastructure in the music domain, capable of informing regulatory discussion, institutional coordination, and future standardisation efforts through documented practice rather than abstract design alone.

The first step is to fix metadata at the source. Rights societies, platforms, labels, libraries, and archives all capture fragments of information about works and recordings. Today this is done in parallel, wasting effort and creating errors. Smarter pipelines, shared identifiers, and pragmatic exchange patterns can make documentation “capture once, reuse many.” This is not a technical upgrade, but a legal and institutional necessity: EU data governance frameworks are explicitly built on subsidiarity and federation, meaning that centralised solutions are not only impractical but structurally incompatible with the European regulatory model.

As discussed in Chapter 3, shared infrastructures make this approach operational in practice.

The second step is to build federated data sharing spaces. Instead of a single giant database, Europe should connect what already exists: collective management systems, heritage archives, and platform catalogues. Each actor stays in control of its own data but agrees to shared profiles, identifiers, and rules. This approach lowers costs, improves trust, and makes cross-border reuse realistic. The Open Music Observatory is our proposal for such a space: not a central repository, but an operational coordination layer that allows decentralised copyright infrastructures to interoperate. This federated model reflects CITF’s conclusion that copyright infrastructures must remain distributed, but linked through shared semantics, APIs, and provenance trails.

This Green Paper shows that the strategic ambitions of the Culture Compass for Europe — particularly regarding cultural data, AI, and evidence-based policy — cannot be realised through generic infrastructures alone1. They require federated, domain-specialised implementation units where cultural complexity demands it. Music, as one of the most demanding cultural domains, provides a robust reference case. The Open Music Observatory demonstrates how such a unit can operate in practice while remaining fully interoperable with Europe’s shared cultural data spaces.

By tracing its origins to CEEMID, the Open Music Observatory demonstrates how long-standing, practitioner-led solutions can be scaled and embedded within European policy frameworks. This continuity underscores that Europe’s cultural data challenges do not require abstract reinvention, but the systematic extension of proven, decentralised approaches to new domains such as copyright infrastructure and AI governance.

An important lesson from the national pilots discussed in this paper is that music data infrastructures should be designed not only for interoperability and rights management, but also to support the production of policy-relevant evidence. Experiments such as the Slovak pilot showed how authoritative rights management data can be harmonised with administrative and statistical sources to generate music-specific indicators aligned with best statistical practice — an area where most Member States currently lack dedicated cultural or creative satellite accounts. Embedding this capability into future European data spaces is essential if music is to be visible in evidence-based cultural and economic policymaking.

As discussed in Chapter 4, artificial intelligence can be used to strengthen, rather than weaken, this foundation.

The third step is to treat AI as a shared utility. Big platforms already use AI to document millions of tracks and to steer attention. Smaller players cannot compete unless Europe provides common tools: AI to reconcile identifiers, repair legacy datasets, enrich metadata in multiple languages, and help creators embed information “from birth.” If deployed in a federated way, AI reduces costs and unfreezes neglected repertoires — while respecting rights, attribution, and diversity. Conversely, without such infrastructure, AI systems cannot reliably meet legal requirements on attribution, transparency, or fairness, regardless of how they are regulated at model level. In this context, the use, development and governance of artificial intelligence should foster human creativity through a fair, human-centric and rights-based approach.

Taken together, these steps close the gap between the right of reuse granted by the Open Data Directive and the means of reuse that the music industry actually needs.

They also resolve a deeper structural gap in European policy: while legal frameworks for copyright, data governance, and AI are well developed, their effective operation depends on interoperable, provenance-rich data infrastructures that are currently missing at scale, bringing Europe’s approach into alignment with the emerging international consensus that cultural data infrastructures must be trustworthy, distributed, and provenance-rich in order to support both human creativity and responsible AI.

Europe should therefore act decisively to make these conditions operational:

This is how Europe can make its music ecosystem fair, efficient, and future-proof — not only safeguarding its cultural heritage, but ensuring that AI strengthens rather than erodes the foundations of musical creativity, diversity, and economic sustainability.

  1. “Pursuing the ambitions of this declaration and fully leveraging culture’s transversal impacts means promoting culture in the EU’s internal and external policies, investing in the cultural and creative sectors and industries, and monitoring progress. We commit to: […] Advancing initiatives aimed at improving the availability of sound and comparable data on culture to support the development of evidence-based cultural policies.” (European Parliament, Council of the European Union, and European Commission 2025, p4)↩︎