Book Review: Music Contracts in the Streaming Age: Law and Policy in the European Union and the United Kingdom

Book Review: Music Contracts in the Streaming Age: Law and Policy in the European Union and the United Kingdom

Journal article

1 electronic resource (page 700–702)

The music business is a particularly fast-moving area, through which one must leap with great agility: as cultures and technologies clash, they evolve, oftentimes forcing one to recontextualise long-held legal, judicial, and market paradigms in light of new consumption patterns. When we receive the fruits of such a complex system, we seldom consider that the access to, and diversity of culture rely significantly on the strength and quality of the individual negotiations and deals that can be struck between creators, distributors, and, invisibly, ourselves. In other words, in the absence of this series of explicit and implicit agreements across the musical value chain, we are robbed of culture, and our society deprived of its music – it’s a bleak picture! This is what makes Vanherpe’s work Music Contracts in the Streaming Age: Law and Policy in the European Union and the United Kingdom especially timely. Digitalisation has ushered in an era of ‘post-ownership’ which has echoed across all copyright industries (p. 43). Music streaming has, likewise, revolutionised music consumption as never before, as users are able to pay a flat-fee subscription to access an endless library of music. From the very beginning of this paradigmatic shift in consumption, the confluence of actors involved has faced a dramatic reconfiguration of their traditional roles, at times significantly affecting their respective bargaining positions (pp. 69-75). As recently as last year (2024), governments such as those of the UK and the EU have reconsidered the need for active intervention and rebalancing of creators’ interests in response to perceived disparities created by music streaming models and their means of collection and distribution of royalties. And, perennially, artists have faced issues of the sustainability of their creative practices in light of innovation, affecting both the demand for their creative works and – perhaps for musicians especially – the very human need to preserve their identity within an ever-changing consumer landscape.

Crossref

GRUR International ; 74, 7, 2025, 2632-8550.

[Oxford, England] : Oxford University Press (OUP), 2025.

English

https://academic.oup.com/grurint/article/72/3/231/6998505

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