Music Recommender Systems And the Copyright Blind Spot: Conceptualising the Right to Be Heard

Digital music platforms project an image of unprecedented abundance, linguistic diversity, and borderless circulation, yet the infrastructures that organise musical discovery increasingly shape who is heard and who remains silent. This paper argues that while EU copyright law effectively secures lawful availability, rights management, and remuneration, it remains structurally indifferent to the allocation of cultural attention. As musical discovery is now mediated primarily through algorithmic recommender systems, visibility has ceased to be a by-product of access and has become a function of metadata, optimisation, and design. The resulting condition of being represented but not heard exposes a doctrinal blind spot in the European copyright acquis and raises broader constitutional concerns relating to artistic freedom, freedom of expression, and cultural participation. Against this backdrop the paper conceptualises a right to be heard as a relational and infrastructural dimension of cultural participation and explores whether prominence-based regulatory approach, inspired by the AVMS Directive, could offer a proportionate response to algorithmically mediated cultural exclusion in the internal market that is compatible with the freedom to conduct a business.