Music Metadata as a Fundamental-Rights Question, or EU’s Positive Obligations to Secure Cultural Visibility and Equality Online

Music metadata – credits, identifiers, language labels, territorial tags, and genre descriptors – functions as the operative infrastructure of streaming. It shapes what becomes searchable, recommendable, charted, and remunerated. This chapter argues that metadata is therefore not a neutral technical resource but a constitutional site where structural inequality is produced or mitigated. When metadata is sparse, standardised around dominant markets, or mis-specified, the resulting visibility and remuneration deficits disproportionately affect minority-language repertoires, music from smaller territories, field recordings and traditional archives, and women and non-binary creators. The chapter situates these “structural metadata harms” within the EU’s fundamental-rights framework, contending that Article 22 CFR (respect for cultural and linguistic diversity), read together with Articles 13 (artistic freedom), 17(2) (intellectual property), 21 (non-discrimination), and 23 (gender equality), constrains and guides metadata governance. Drawing on CJEU rights-balancing and ECtHR doctrines of positive obligations and indirect discrimination (via Article 52(3) CFR), it develops the claim that EU regulatory and standard-setting choices must secure the practical and effective enjoyment of cultural visibility and equal rights-realisation online.