ITSRIGHT at the EU Parliament: “Direct payments from platforms to artists for fairer streaming.”

Spotify announces over $11 billion to the music industry in 2025. But how much actually reaches artists?
Yesterday, while Spotify celebrated what it calls “the largest annual payout in the history of the industry,” ITSRIGHT intervened at the European Parliament to expose a narrative that does not reflect reality.
During the event “Music is work. Streaming: transparency in data, fairness in remuneration,” organized by the Italian S&D Delegation led by Hon. Nicola Zingaretti, we denounced the deep distortions of an opaque and unbalanced system.
The initiative, which opened the European debate on the revision of the Digital Copyright Directive, featured a delegation of artists – including Mario Biondi, Poison Beatz, Eugenio Finardi – together with AUDIOCOOP and IMARA, the network representing the main international collecting societies for artists’ and musicians’ related rights.
Today performers compensations are unfair, as confirmed by a study by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, presented by Professor Matteo Tarantino during the evening. According to the study:

• 90% of artists are present on streaming platforms
• but 80% declare they earn nothing or only negligible amounts from streaming

A critical picture also confirmed by international studies and by the European Parliament resolution of January 2024, which denounces the power imbalance among the various market players. In Italy, the law exists, but it remains unfulfilled. With the transposition of the Digital Copyright Directive in 2021, Italy introduced strengthened protections for performing artists, recognizing:

• the right to fair and proportionate remuneration based on generated revenues
• the right to complete and transparent information on how works are exploited

However, these provisions remain largely unenforced. ITSRIGHT’s proposal is therefore clear and concrete. We call on institutions to intervene so that artists can receive payments directly from platforms, bypassing the current intermediary system of record labels. Only in this way can equity and transparency be restored in the market. Protecting creative work is a cultural and economic priority. Without fair remuneration, there can be no sustainability for the European music sector. It is time to put artists back at the center of European cultural and digital policy.