Author remuneration in the streaming age – exploitation rights and fair remuneration rules in the EU

Abstract The shift from linear to on-demand consumption of copyright content on platforms like Spotify, Netflix and YouTube raises the question of whether authors and performers receive a fair share of streaming revenues. While industry rights holders have the opportunity to control access to protected content, it is often not the creators themselves who benefit from growing streaming revenue. The issue is global. In the EU, debates over the 2019 Copyright Directive led to harmonized rules on fair author remuneration. In 2023, the Group of Latin American and Caribbean Countries urged the World Intellectual Property Organization to analyse creators’ earnings from digital content. South Africa followed suit with its Copyright Amendment Bill in 2024. Together, these regional, international and national initiatives underscore the central role of remuneration in today’s copyright and streaming debates. This analysis focuses on the EU legal framework, which provides mechanisms to secure fair remuneration for authors and performers. These include rules for licensing agreements – such as contract adjustments, transparency obligations, revocation rights and jurisdiction norms – as well as a liability regime for user-generated content encouraging rights clearance. Mandatory collective licensing and remunerated copyright exceptions also help generate revenue for creators. Section I lays the groundwork for the discussion of these legal instruments. Section II reviews exclusive rights applicable to streaming. Section III describes the different legal mechanisms to ensure creators’ fair remuneration – from individual and mandatory collective licensing to remunerated copyright exceptions. Section IV explores producers’ bargaining power in streaming platform contexts, and Section V summarizes the results.