what is an outline research paper

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Getting started with your research paper outline

Levels of organization for a research paper outline

First level of organization, second level of organization, third level of organization, fourth level of organization, tips for writing a research paper outline, research paper outline template, my research paper outline is complete: what are the next steps, frequently asked questions about a research paper outline, related articles.

The outline is the skeleton of your research paper. Simply start by writing down your thesis and the main ideas you wish to present. This will likely change as your research progresses; therefore, do not worry about being too specific in the early stages of writing your outline.

A research paper outline typically contains between two and four layers of organization. The first two layers are the most generalized. Each layer thereafter will contain the research you complete and presents more and more detailed information.

The levels are typically represented by a combination of Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, uppercase letters, lowercase letters but may include other symbols. Refer to the guidelines provided by your institution, as formatting is not universal and differs between universities, fields, and subjects. If you are writing the outline for yourself, you may choose any combination you prefer.

This is the most generalized level of information. Begin by numbering the introduction, each idea you will present, and the conclusion. The main ideas contain the bulk of your research paper 's information. Depending on your research, it may be chapters of a book for a literature review , a series of dates for a historical research paper, or the methods and results of a scientific paper.

I. Introduction

II. Main idea

III. Main idea

IV. Main idea

V. Conclusion

The second level consists of topics which support the introduction, main ideas, and the conclusion. Each main idea should have at least two supporting topics listed in the outline.

If your main idea does not have enough support, you should consider presenting another main idea in its place. This is where you should stop outlining if this is your first draft. Continue your research before adding to the next levels of organization.

• A. Background information
• B. Hypothesis or thesis
• A. Supporting topic
• B. Supporting topic

The third level of organization contains supporting information for the topics previously listed. By now, you should have completed enough research to add support for your ideas.

The Introduction and Main Ideas may contain information you discovered about the author, timeframe, or contents of a book for a literature review; the historical events leading up to the research topic for a historical research paper, or an explanation of the problem a scientific research paper intends to address.

• 1. Relevant history
• 2. Relevant history
• 1. The hypothesis or thesis clearly stated
• 1. A brief description of supporting information
• 2. A brief description of supporting information

The fourth level of organization contains the most detailed information such as quotes, references, observations, or specific data needed to support the main idea. It is not typical to have further levels of organization because the information contained here is the most specific.

• a) Quotes or references to another piece of literature
• b) Quotes or references to another piece of literature

Tip: The key to creating a useful outline is to be consistent in your headings, organization, and levels of specificity.

• Be Consistent : ensure every heading has a similar tone. State the topic or write short sentences for each heading but avoid doing both.
• Organize Information : Higher levels of organization are more generally stated and each supporting level becomes more specific. The introduction and conclusion will never be lower than the first level of organization.
• Build Support : Each main idea should have two or more supporting topics. If your research does not have enough information to support the main idea you are presenting, you should, in general, complete additional research or revise the outline.

By now, you should know the basic requirements to create an outline for your paper. With a content framework in place, you can now start writing your paper . To help you start right away, you can use one of our templates and adjust it to suit your needs.

After completing your outline, you should:

• Title your research paper . This is an iterative process and may change when you delve deeper into the topic.
• Begin writing your research paper draft . Continue researching to further build your outline and provide more information to support your hypothesis or thesis.
• Format your draft appropriately . MLA 8 and APA 7 formats have differences between their bibliography page, in-text citations, line spacing, and title.
• Finalize your citations and bibliography . Use a reference manager like Paperpile to organize and cite your research.
• Write the abstract, if required . An abstract will briefly state the information contained within the paper, results of the research, and the conclusion.

An outline is used to organize written ideas about a topic into a logical order. Outlines help us organize major topics, subtopics, and supporting details. Researchers benefit greatly from outlines while writing by addressing which topic to cover in what order.

The most basic outline format consists of: an introduction, a minimum of three topic paragraphs, and a conclusion.

You should make an outline before starting to write your research paper. This will help you organize the main ideas and arguments you want to present in your topic.

• Consistency: ensure every heading has a similar tone. State the topic or write short sentences for each heading but avoid doing both.
• Organization : Higher levels of organization are more generally stated and each supporting level becomes more specific. The introduction and conclusion will never be lower than the first level of organization.
• Support : Each main idea should have two or more supporting topics. If your research does not have enough information to support the main idea you are presenting, you should, in general, complete additional research or revise the outline.

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Home » Research Paper Outline – Types, Example, Template

Research Paper Outline – Types, Example, Template

Table of Contents

By creating a well-structured research paper outline, writers can easily organize their thoughts and ideas and ensure that their final paper is clear, concise, and effective. In this article, we will explore the essential components of a research paper outline and provide some tips and tricks for creating a successful one.

Research Paper Outline

Research paper outline is a plan or a structural framework that organizes the main ideas , arguments, and supporting evidence in a logical sequence. It serves as a blueprint or a roadmap for the writer to follow while drafting the actual research paper .

Typically, an outline consists of the following elements:

• Introduction : This section presents the topic, research question , and thesis statement of the paper. It also provides a brief overview of the literature review and the methodology used.
• Literature Review: This section provides a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, theories, and concepts related to the research topic. It analyzes the existing research and identifies the research gaps and research questions.
• Methodology: This section explains the research design, data collection methods, data analysis, and ethical considerations of the study.
• Results: This section presents the findings of the study, using tables, graphs, and statistics to illustrate the data.
• Discussion : This section interprets the results of the study, and discusses their implications, significance, and limitations. It also suggests future research directions.
• Conclusion : This section summarizes the main findings of the study and restates the thesis statement.
• References: This section lists all the sources cited in the paper using the appropriate citation style.

Research Paper Outline Types

There are several types of outlines that can be used for research papers, including:

Alphanumeric Outline

This is a traditional outline format that uses Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lowercase letters to organize the main ideas and supporting details of a research paper. It is commonly used for longer, more complex research papers.

I. Introduction

• A. Background information
• B. Thesis statement
• 1 1. Supporting detail
• 1 2. Supporting detail 2
• 2 1. Supporting detail

III. Conclusion

• A. Restate thesis
• B. Summarize main points

Decimal Outline

This outline format uses numbers to organize the main ideas and supporting details of a research paper. It is similar to the alphanumeric outline, but it uses only numbers and decimals to indicate the hierarchy of the ideas.

• 1.1 Background information
• 1.2 Thesis statement
• 1 2.1.1 Supporting detail
• 1 2.1.2 Supporting detail
• 2 2.2.1 Supporting detail
• 1 2.2.2 Supporting detail
• 3.1 Restate thesis
• 3.2 Summarize main points

Full Sentence Outline

This type of outline uses complete sentences to describe the main ideas and supporting details of a research paper. It is useful for those who prefer to see the entire paper outlined in complete sentences.

• Provide background information on the topic
• State the thesis statement
• Explain main idea 1 and provide supporting details
• Discuss main idea 2 and provide supporting details
• Restate the thesis statement
• Summarize the main points of the paper

Topic Outline

This type of outline uses short phrases or words to describe the main ideas and supporting details of a research paper. It is useful for those who prefer to see a more concise overview of the paper.

• Background information
• Thesis statement
• Supporting detail 1
• Supporting detail 2
• Restate thesis
• Summarize main points

Reverse Outline

This is an outline that is created after the paper has been written. It involves going back through the paper and summarizing each paragraph or section in one sentence. This can be useful for identifying gaps in the paper or areas that need further development.

• Introduction : Provides background information and states the thesis statement.
• Paragraph 1: Discusses main idea 1 and provides supporting details.
• Paragraph 2: Discusses main idea 2 and provides supporting details.
• Paragraph 3: Addresses potential counterarguments.
• Conclusion : Restates thesis and summarizes main points.

Mind Map Outline

This type of outline involves creating a visual representation of the main ideas and supporting details of a research paper. It can be useful for those who prefer a more creative and visual approach to outlining.

• Supporting detail 1: Lack of funding for public schools.
• Supporting detail 2: Decrease in government support for education.
• Supporting detail 1: Increase in income inequality.
• Supporting detail 2: Decrease in social mobility.

Research Paper Outline Example

Research Paper Outline Example on Cyber Security:

A. Overview of Cybersecurity

• B. Importance of Cybersecurity
• C. Purpose of the paper

II. Cyber Threats

A. Definition of Cyber Threats

• B. Types of Cyber Threats
• C. Examples of Cyber Threats

III. Cybersecurity Measures

A. Prevention measures

• Anti-virus software
• Encryption B. Detection measures
• Intrusion Detection System (IDS)
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
• Security Operations Center (SOC) C. Response measures
• Incident Response Plan
• Business Continuity Plan
• Disaster Recovery Plan

IV. Cybersecurity in the Business World

A. Overview of Cybersecurity in the Business World

B. Cybersecurity Risk Assessment

C. Best Practices for Cybersecurity in Business

V. Cybersecurity in Government Organizations

A. Overview of Cybersecurity in Government Organizations

C. Best Practices for Cybersecurity in Government Organizations

VI. Cybersecurity Ethics

A. Definition of Cybersecurity Ethics

B. Importance of Cybersecurity Ethics

C. Examples of Cybersecurity Ethics

VII. Future of Cybersecurity

A. Overview of the Future of Cybersecurity

B. Emerging Cybersecurity Threats

C. Advancements in Cybersecurity Technology

VIII. Conclusion

A. Summary of the paper

B. Recommendations for Cybersecurity

• C. Conclusion.

IX. References

A. List of sources cited in the paper

B. Bibliography of additional resources

Introduction

Cybersecurity refers to the protection of computer systems, networks, and sensitive data from unauthorized access, theft, damage, or any other form of cyber attack. B. Importance of Cybersecurity The increasing reliance on technology and the growing number of cyber threats make cybersecurity an essential aspect of modern society. Cybersecurity breaches can result in financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities. C. Purpose of the paper This paper aims to provide an overview of cybersecurity, cyber threats, cybersecurity measures, cybersecurity in the business and government sectors, cybersecurity ethics, and the future of cybersecurity.

A cyber threat is any malicious act or event that attempts to compromise or disrupt computer systems, networks, or sensitive data. B. Types of Cyber Threats Common types of cyber threats include malware, phishing, social engineering, ransomware, DDoS attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs). C. Examples of Cyber Threats Recent cyber threats include the SolarWinds supply chain attack, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and the Microsoft Exchange Server hack.

Prevention measures aim to minimize the risk of cyber attacks by implementing security controls, such as firewalls, anti-virus software, and encryption.

• Firewalls Firewalls act as a barrier between a computer network and the internet, filtering incoming and outgoing traffic to prevent unauthorized access.
• Anti-virus software Anti-virus software detects, prevents, and removes malware from computer systems.
• Encryption Encryption involves the use of mathematical algorithms to transform sensitive data into a code that can only be accessed by authorized individuals. B. Detection measures Detection measures aim to identify and respond to cyber attacks as quickly as possible, such as intrusion detection systems (IDS), security information and event management (SIEM), and security operations centers (SOCs).
• Intrusion Detection System (IDS) IDS monitors network traffic for signs of unauthorized access, such as unusual patterns or anomalies.
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) SIEM combines security information management and security event management to provide real-time monitoring and analysis of security alerts.
• Security Operations Center (SOC) SOC is a dedicated team responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to cyber threats. C. Response measures Response measures aim to mitigate the impact of a cyber attack and restore normal operations, such as incident response plans (IRPs), business continuity plans (BCPs), and disaster recovery plans (DRPs).
• Incident Response Plan IRPs outline the procedures and protocols to follow in the event of a cyber attack, including communication protocols, roles and responsibilities, and recovery processes.
• Business Continuity Plan BCPs ensure that critical business functions can continue in the event of a cyber attack or other disruption.
• Disaster Recovery Plan DRPs outline the procedures to recover from a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster or cyber attack.

Cybersecurity is crucial for businesses of all sizes and industries, as they handle sensitive data, financial transactions, and intellectual property that are attractive targets for cyber criminals.

Risk assessment is a critical step in developing a cybersecurity strategy, which involves identifying potential threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences to determine the level of risk and prioritize security measures.

Best practices for cybersecurity in business include implementing strong passwords and multi-factor authentication, regularly updating software and hardware, training employees on cybersecurity awareness, and regularly backing up data.

Government organizations face unique cybersecurity challenges, as they handle sensitive information related to national security, defense, and critical infrastructure.

Risk assessment in government organizations involves identifying and assessing potential threats and vulnerabilities, conducting regular audits, and complying with relevant regulations and standards.

Best practices for cybersecurity in government organizations include implementing secure communication protocols, regularly updating and patching software, and conducting regular cybersecurity training and awareness programs for employees.

Cybersecurity ethics refers to the ethical considerations involved in cybersecurity, such as privacy, data protection, and the responsible use of technology.

Cybersecurity ethics are crucial for maintaining trust in technology, protecting privacy and data, and promoting responsible behavior in the digital world.

Examples of cybersecurity ethics include protecting the privacy of user data, ensuring data accuracy and integrity, and implementing fair and unbiased algorithms.

The future of cybersecurity will involve a shift towards more advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and quantum computing.

Emerging cybersecurity threats include AI-powered cyber attacks, the use of deepfakes and synthetic media, and the potential for quantum computing to break current encryption methods.

Advancements in cybersecurity technology include the development of AI and machine learning-based security tools, the use of blockchain for secure data storage and sharing, and the development of post-quantum encryption methods.

This paper has provided an overview of cybersecurity, cyber threats, cybersecurity measures, cybersecurity in the business and government sectors, cybersecurity ethics, and the future of cybersecurity.

To enhance cybersecurity, organizations should prioritize risk assessment and implement a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that includes prevention, detection, and response measures. Additionally, organizations should prioritize cybersecurity ethics to promote responsible behavior in the digital world.

C. Conclusion

Cybersecurity is an essential aspect of modern society, and organizations must prioritize cybersecurity to protect sensitive data and maintain trust in technology.

for further reading

X. Appendices

A. Glossary of key terms

B. Cybersecurity checklist for organizations

C. Sample cybersecurity policy for businesses

D. Sample cybersecurity incident response plan

E. Cybersecurity training and awareness resources

Note : The content and organization of the paper may vary depending on the specific requirements of the assignment or target audience. This outline serves as a general guide for writing a research paper on cybersecurity. Do not use this in your assingmets.

Research Paper Outline Template

• Background information and context of the research topic
• Research problem and questions
• Purpose and objectives of the research
• Scope and limitations

II. Literature Review

• Overview of existing research on the topic
• Key concepts and theories related to the research problem
• Identification of gaps in the literature
• Summary of relevant studies and their findings

III. Methodology

• Research design and approach
• Data collection methods and procedures
• Data analysis techniques
• Validity and reliability considerations
• Ethical considerations

IV. Results

• Presentation of research findings
• Analysis and interpretation of data
• Explanation of significant results
• Discussion of unexpected results

V. Discussion

• Comparison of research findings with existing literature
• Implications of results for theory and practice
• Limitations and future directions for research
• Conclusion and recommendations

VI. Conclusion

• Summary of research problem, purpose, and objectives
• Discussion of significant findings
• Contribution to the field of study
• Implications for practice
• Suggestions for future research

VII. References

• List of sources cited in the research paper using appropriate citation style.

Note : This is just an template, and depending on the requirements of your assignment or the specific research topic, you may need to modify or adjust the sections or headings accordingly.

Research Paper Outline Writing Guide

Here’s a guide to help you create an effective research paper outline:

• Choose a topic : Select a topic that is interesting, relevant, and meaningful to you.
• Conduct research: Gather information on the topic from a variety of sources, such as books, articles, journals, and websites.
• Organize your ideas: Organize your ideas and information into logical groups and subgroups. This will help you to create a clear and concise outline.
• Create an outline: Begin your outline with an introduction that includes your thesis statement. Then, organize your ideas into main points and subpoints. Each main point should be supported by evidence and examples.
• Introduction: The introduction of your research paper should include the thesis statement, background information, and the purpose of the research paper.
• Body : The body of your research paper should include the main points and subpoints. Each point should be supported by evidence and examples.
• Conclusion : The conclusion of your research paper should summarize the main points and restate the thesis statement.
• Reference List: Include a reference list at the end of your research paper. Make sure to properly cite all sources used in the paper.
• Proofreading : Proofread your research paper to ensure that it is free of errors and grammatical mistakes.
• Finalizing : Finalize your research paper by reviewing the outline and making any necessary changes.

When to Write Research Paper Outline

It’s a good idea to write a research paper outline before you begin drafting your paper. The outline will help you organize your thoughts and ideas, and it can serve as a roadmap for your writing process.

Here are a few situations when you might want to consider writing an outline:

• When you’re starting a new research project: If you’re beginning a new research project, an outline can help you get organized from the very beginning. You can use your outline to brainstorm ideas, map out your research goals, and identify potential sources of information.
• When you’re struggling to organize your thoughts: If you find yourself struggling to organize your thoughts or make sense of your research, an outline can be a helpful tool. It can help you see the big picture of your project and break it down into manageable parts.
• When you’re working with a tight deadline : If you have a deadline for your research paper, an outline can help you stay on track and ensure that you cover all the necessary points. By mapping out your paper in advance, you can work more efficiently and avoid getting stuck or overwhelmed.

Purpose of Research Paper Outline

The purpose of a research paper outline is to provide a structured and organized plan for the writer to follow while conducting research and writing the paper. An outline is essentially a roadmap that guides the writer through the entire research process, from the initial research and analysis of the topic to the final writing and editing of the paper.

A well-constructed outline can help the writer to:

• Organize their thoughts and ideas on the topic, and ensure that all relevant information is included.
• Identify any gaps in their research or argument, and address them before starting to write the paper.
• Ensure that the paper follows a logical and coherent structure, with clear transitions between different sections.
• Save time and effort by providing a clear plan for the writer to follow, rather than starting from scratch and having to revise the paper multiple times.

Advantages of Research Paper Outline

Some of the key advantages of a research paper outline include:

• Helps to organize thoughts and ideas : An outline helps to organize all the different ideas and information that you want to include in your paper. By creating an outline, you can ensure that all the points you want to make are covered and in a logical order.
• Saves time and effort : An outline saves time and effort because it helps you to focus on the key points of your paper. It also helps you to identify any gaps or areas where more research may be needed.
• Makes the writing process easier : With an outline, you have a clear roadmap of what you want to write, and this makes the writing process much easier. You can simply follow your outline and fill in the details as you go.
• Improves the quality of your paper : By having a clear outline, you can ensure that all the important points are covered and in a logical order. This makes your paper more coherent and easier to read, which ultimately improves its overall quality.
• Facilitates collaboration: If you are working on a research paper with others, an outline can help to facilitate collaboration. By sharing your outline, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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How Can You Create a Well Planned Research Paper Outline

You are staring at the blank document, meaning to start writing your research paper . After months of experiments and procuring results, your PI asked you to write the paper to publish it in a reputed journal. You spoke to your peers and a few seniors and received a few tips on writing a research paper, but you still can’t plan on how to begin!

Writing a research paper is a very common issue among researchers and is often looked upon as a time consuming hurdle. Researchers usually look up to this task as an impending threat, avoiding and procrastinating until they cannot delay it anymore. Seeking advice from internet and seniors they manage to write a paper which goes in for quite a few revisions. Making researchers lose their sense of understanding with respect to their research work and findings. In this article, we would like to discuss how to create a structured research paper outline which will assist a researcher in writing their research paper effectively!

Publication is an important component of research studies in a university for academic promotion and in obtaining funding to support research. However, the primary reason is to provide the data and hypotheses to scientific community to advance the understanding in a specific domain. A scientific paper is a formal record of a research process. It documents research protocols, methods, results, conclusion, and discussion from a research hypothesis .

Table of Contents

What Is a Research Paper Outline?

A research paper outline is a basic format for writing an academic research paper. It follows the IMRAD format (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). However, this format varies depending on the type of research manuscript. A research paper outline consists of following sections to simplify the paper for readers. These sections help researchers build an effective paper outline.

1. Title Page

The title page provides important information which helps the editors, reviewers, and readers identify the manuscript and the authors at a glance. It also provides an overview of the field of research the research paper belongs to. The title should strike a balance between precise and detailed. Other generic details include author’s given name, affiliation, keywords that will provide indexing, details of the corresponding author etc. are added to the title page.

2. Abstract

Abstract is the most important section of the manuscript and will help the researcher create a detailed research paper outline . To be more precise, an abstract is like an advertisement to the researcher’s work and it influences the editor in deciding whether to submit the manuscript to reviewers or not. Writing an abstract is a challenging task. Researchers can write an exemplary abstract by selecting the content carefully and being concise.

3. Introduction

An introduction is a background statement that provides the context and approach of the research. It describes the problem statement with the assistance of the literature study and elaborates the requirement to update the knowledge gap. It sets the research hypothesis and informs the readers about the big research question.

This section is usually named as “Materials and Methods”, “Experiments” or “Patients and Methods” depending upon the type of journal. This purpose provides complete information on methods used for the research. Researchers should mention clear description of materials and their use in the research work. If the methods used in research are already published, give a brief account and refer to the original publication. However, if the method used is modified from the original method, then researcher should mention the modifications done to the original protocol and validate its accuracy, precision, and repeatability.

It is best to report results as tables and figures wherever possible. Also, avoid duplication of text and ensure that the text summarizes the findings. Report the results with appropriate descriptive statistics. Furthermore, report any unexpected events that could affect the research results, and mention complete account of observations and explanations for missing data (if any).

6. Discussion

The discussion should set the research in context, strengthen its importance and support the research hypothesis. Summarize the main results of the study in one or two paragraphs and show how they logically fit in an overall scheme of studies. Compare the results with other investigations in the field of research and explain the differences.

7. Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements identify and thank the contributors to the study, who are not under the criteria of co-authors. It also includes the recognition of funding agency and universities that award scholarships or fellowships to researchers.

8. Declaration of Competing Interests

Finally, declaring the competing interests is essential to abide by ethical norms of unique research publishing. Competing interests arise when the author has more than one role that may lead to a situation where there is a conflict of interest.

Steps to Write a Research Paper Outline

• Write down all important ideas that occur to you concerning the research paper .
• Answer questions such as – what is the topic of my paper? Why is the topic important? How to formulate the hypothesis? What are the major findings?
• Add context and structure. Group all your ideas into sections – Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion/Conclusion.
• Add relevant questions to each section. It is important to note down the questions. This will help you align your thoughts.
• Expand the ideas based on the questions created in the paper outline.
• After creating a detailed outline, discuss it with your mentors and peers.
• Get enough feedback and decide on the journal you will submit to.
• The process of real writing begins.

Benefits of Creating a Research Paper Outline

As discussed, the research paper subheadings create an outline of what different aspects of research needs elaboration. This provides subtopics on which the researchers brainstorm and reach a conclusion to write. A research paper outline organizes the researcher’s thoughts and gives a clear picture of how to formulate the research protocols and results. It not only helps the researcher to understand the flow of information but also provides relation between the ideas.

A research paper outline helps researcher achieve a smooth transition between topics and ensures that no research point is forgotten. Furthermore, it allows the reader to easily navigate through the research paper and provides a better understanding of the research. The paper outline allows the readers to find relevant information and quotes from different part of the paper.

Research Paper Outline Template

A research paper outline template can help you understand the concept of creating a well planned research paper before beginning to write and walk through your journey of research publishing.

1. Research Title

A. Background i. Support with evidence ii. Support with existing literature studies

B. Thesis Statement i. Link literature with hypothesis ii. Support with evidence iii. Explain the knowledge gap and how this research will help build the gap 4. Body

A. Methods i. Mention materials and protocols used in research ii. Support with evidence

B. Results i. Support with tables and figures ii. Mention appropriate descriptive statistics

C. Discussion i. Support the research with context ii. Support the research hypothesis iii. Compare the results with other investigations in field of research

D. Conclusion i. Support the discussion and research investigation ii. Support with literature studies

E. Acknowledgements i. Identify and thank the contributors ii. Include the funding agency, if any

F. Declaration of Competing Interests

5. References

Download the Research Paper Outline Template!

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An outline is a formal system used to develop a framework for thinking about what should be the organization and eventual contents of your paper. An outline helps you predict the overall structure and flow of a paper.

Why and How to Create a Useful Outline. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University.

Importance of...

Writing papers in college requires you to come up with sophisticated, complex, and sometimes very creative ways of structuring your ideas . Taking the time to draft an outline can help you determine if your ideas connect to each other, what order of ideas works best, where gaps in your thinking may exist, or whether you have sufficient evidence to support each of your points. It is also an effective way to think about the time you will need to complete each part of your paper before you begin writing.

A good outline is important because :

• You will be much less likely to get writer's block . An outline will show where you're going and how to get there. Use the outline to set goals for completing each section of your paper.
• It will help you stay organized and focused throughout the writing process and help ensure proper coherence [flow of ideas] in your final paper. However, the outline should be viewed as a guide, not a straitjacket. As you review the literature or gather data, the organization of your paper may change; adjust your outline accordingly.
• A clear, detailed outline ensures that you always have something to help re-calibrate your writing should you feel yourself drifting into subject areas unrelated to the research problem. Use your outline to set boundaries around what you will investigate.
• The outline can be key to staying motivated . You can put together an outline when you're excited about the project and everything is clicking; making an outline is never as overwhelming as sitting down and beginning to write a twenty page paper without any sense of where it is going.
• An outline helps you organize multiple ideas about a topic . Most research problems can be analyzed from a variety of perspectives; an outline can help you sort out which modes of analysis are most appropriate to ensure the most robust findings are discovered.
• An outline not only helps you organize your thoughts, but it can also serve as a schedule for when certain aspects of your writing should be accomplished . Review the assignment and highlight the due dates of specific tasks and integrate these into your outline. If your professor has not created specific deadlines, create your own deadlines by thinking about your own writing style and the need to manage your time around other course assignments.

How to Structure and Organize Your Paper. Odegaard Writing & Research Center. University of Washington; Why and How to Create a Useful Outline. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Lietzau, Kathleen. Creating Outlines. Writing Center, University of Richmond.

Structure and Writing Style

I.   General Approaches

There are two general approaches you can take when writing an outline for your paper:

The topic outline consists of short phrases. This approach is useful when you are dealing with a number of different issues that could be arranged in a variety of different ways in your paper. Due to short phrases having more content than using simple sentences, they create better content from which to build your paper.

The sentence outline is done in full sentences. This approach is useful when your paper focuses on complex issues in detail. The sentence outline is also useful because sentences themselves have many of the details in them needed to build a paper and it allows you to include those details in the sentences instead of having to create an outline of short phrases that goes on page after page.

II.   Steps to Making the Outline

A strong outline details each topic and subtopic in your paper, organizing these points so that they build your argument toward an evidence-based conclusion. Writing an outline will also help you focus on the task at hand and avoid unnecessary tangents, logical fallacies, and underdeveloped paragraphs.

• Identify the research problem . The research problem is the focal point from which the rest of the outline flows. Try to sum up the point of your paper in one sentence or phrase. It also can be key to deciding what the title of your paper should be.
• Identify the main categories . What main points will you analyze? The introduction describes all of your main points; the rest of  your paper can be spent developing those points.
• Create the first category . What is the first point you want to cover? If the paper centers around a complicated term, a definition can be a good place to start. For a paper that concerns the application and testing of a particular theory, giving the general background on the theory can be a good place to begin.
• Create subcategories . After you have followed these steps, create points under it that provide support for the main point. The number of categories that you use depends on the amount of information that you are trying to cover. There is no right or wrong number to use.

Once you have developed the basic outline of the paper, organize the contents to match the standard format of a research paper as described in this guide.

III.   Things to Consider When Writing an Outline

• There is no rule dictating which approach is best . Choose either a topic outline or a sentence outline based on which one you believe will work best for you. However, once you begin developing an outline, it's helpful to stick to only one approach.
• Both topic and sentence outlines use Roman and Arabic numerals along with capital and small letters of the alphabet arranged in a consistent and rigid sequence. A rigid format should be used especially if you are required to hand in your outline.
• Although the format of an outline is rigid, it shouldn't make you inflexible about how to write your paper. Often when you start investigating a research problem [i.e., reviewing the research literature], especially if you are unfamiliar with the topic, you should anticipate the likelihood your analysis could go in different directions. If your paper changes focus, or you need to add new sections, then feel free to reorganize the outline.
• If appropriate, organize the main points of your outline in chronological order . In papers where you need to trace the history or chronology of events or issues, it is important to arrange your outline in the same manner, knowing that it's easier to re-arrange things now than when you've almost finished your paper.
• For a standard research paper of 15-20 pages, your outline should be no more than few pages in length . It may be helpful as you are developing your outline to also write down a tentative list of references.

Muirhead, Brent. “Using Outlines to Improve Online Student Writing Skills.” Journal on School Educational Technology 1, (2005): 17-23; Four Main Components for Effective Outlines. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; How to Make an Outline. Psychology Writing Center. University of Washington; Kartawijaya, Sukarta. “Improving Students’ Writing Skill in Writing Paragraph through an Outline Technique.” Curricula: Journal of Teaching and Learning 3 (2018); Organization: Informal Outlines. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Organization: Standard Outline Form. The Reading/Writing Center. Hunter College; Outlining. Department of English Writing Guide. George Mason University; Plotnic, Jerry. Organizing an Essay. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Reverse Outline. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Reverse Outlines: A Writer's Technique for Examining Organization. The Writer’s Handbook. Writing Center. University of Wisconsin, Madison; Using Outlines. Writing Tutorial Services, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. Indiana University; Writing: Considering Structure and Organization. Institute for Writing Rhetoric. Dartmouth College.

Writing Tip

A Disorganized Outline Means a Disorganized Paper!

If, in writing your paper, it begins to diverge from your outline, this is very likely a sign that you've lost your focus. How do you know whether to change the paper to fit the outline, or, that you need to reconsider the outline so that it fits the paper? A good way to check your progress is to use what you have written to recreate the outline. This is an effective strategy for assessing the organization of your paper. If the resulting outline says what you want it to say and it is in an order that is easy to follow, then the organization of your paper has been successful. If you discover that it's difficult to create an outline from what you have written, then you likely need to revise your paper.

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• Last Updated: May 30, 2024 9:38 AM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide

How to Do Research: A Step-By-Step Guide: 4b. Outline the Paper

• Get Started
• 1a. Select a Topic
• 1b. Develop Research Questions
• 1c. Identify Keywords
• 1d. Find Background Information
• 1e. Refine a Topic
• 2a. Search Strategies
• 2d. Articles
• 2e. Videos & Images
• 2f. Databases
• 2g. Websites
• 2h. Grey Literature
• 2i. Open Access Materials
• 3a. Evaluate Sources
• 3b. Primary vs. Secondary
• 3c. Types of Periodicals
• 4a. Take Notes
• 4b. Outline the Paper
• 4c. Incorporate Source Material
• 5a. Avoid Plagiarism
• 5b. Zotero & MyBib
• 5c. MLA Formatting
• 5d. MLA Citation Examples
• 5e. APA Formatting
• 5f. APA Citation Examples
• 5g. Annotated Bibliographies

Why Outline?

For research papers, a formal outline can help you keep track of large amounts of information.

Sample Outline

Thesis: Federal regulations need to foster laws that will help protect wetlands, restore those that have been destroyed, and take measures to improve the damage from overdevelopment.

I. Nature's ecosystem

   A. Loss of wetlands nationally

   B. Loss of wetlands in Illinois

      1. More flooding and poorer water quality

      2. Lost ability to prevent floods, clean water and store water

II. Dramatic floods

   A, Cost in dollars and lives

      1. 13 deaths between 1988 and 1998

      2. Cost of $39 million per year

   B. Great Midwestern Flood of 1993

      1. Lost wetlands in IL

      2. Devastation in some states

   C. Flood Prevention

      1. Plants and Soils

      2. Floodplain overflow

III. Wetland laws

   A. Inadequately informed legislators

      1. Watersheds

      2. Interconnections in natural water systems

   B. Water purification

IV. Need to save wetlands

   A. New federal definition

   B. Re-education about interconnectedness

      1. Ecology at every grade level

      2. Education for politicians and developers

      3. Choices in schools and people's lives

Example taken from The Bedford Guide for College Writers (9th ed).

How to Create an Outline

To create an outline:

• Place your thesis statement at the beginning.
• List the major points that support your thesis. Label them in Roman numerals (I, II, III, etc.).
• List supporting ideas or arguments for each major point. Label them in capital letters (A, B, C, etc.).
• If applicable, continue to sub-divide each supporting idea until your outline is fully developed. Label them 1, 2, 3, etc., and then a, b, c, etc.

NOTE: EasyBib has a function that will help you create a clear and effective outline.

How to Structure an Outline

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How to Write a Research Paper Outline with Examples

You sometimes have to submit an essay outline or a research proposal checklist for a research project before you do most of the actual research to show that you have understood the assignment, defined a good research question or hypothesis, and contemplated the structure of your research paper. You can find various templates and examples for such outlines, which usually begin with “put your thesis statement/research question at the top” and then ask you to decide whether to add your supporting ideas/points in “alphanumeric,” “decimal,” or “full-sentence” style. 

That is certainly one useful (if not overly formalized) way of using outlining to prepare to draft an academic text. But here we want to talk about how to make an outline after you have done a research project or thesis work and are not quite sure how to put everything together into a written thesis to hand in or a research paper manuscript to submit to a journal.

What is a research paper outline?

Creating a research project outline entails more than just listing bullet points (although you can use bullet points and lists in your outline). It includes how to organize everything you have done and thought about and want to say about your work into a clear structure you can use as the basis for your research paper. 

There are two different methods of creating an outline: let’s call these “abstract style” and “paper style.” These names reflect how briefly you summarize your work at this initial point, or show how extensive and complicated the methods and designs you used and the data you collected are. The type of outline you use also depends on how clear the story you want to tell is and how much organizing and structuring of information you still need to do before you can draft your actual paper. 

Table of Contents:

• Abstract-Style Outline Format
• Paper-Style Outline Format

Additional Tips for Outlining a Research Paper in English

Abstract-style research paper outline format.

A research paper outline in abstract style consists, like the abstract of a research paper , of short answers to the essential questions that anyone trying to understand your work would ask.

• Why did you decide to do what you did?
• What exactly did you do?
• How did you do it?
• What did you find?
• What does it mean?
• What should you/we/someone else do now?

These questions form the structure of not only a typical research paper abstract but also a typical article manuscript. They will eventually be omitted and replaced by the usual headers, such as Introduction/Background, Aim, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, etc. Answering these key questions for yourself first (with keywords or short sentences) and then sticking to the same structure and information when drafting your article will ensure that your story is consistent and that there are no logical gaps or contradictions between the different sections of a research paper . 

If you draft this abstract outline carefully, you can use it as the basis for every other part of your paper. You reduce it even more, down to the absolute essential elements, to create your manuscript title ; you choose your keywords on the basis of the summary presented here; and you expand it into the introduction , methods , results , and discussion sections of your paper without contradicting yourself or losing the logical thread. 

Research Paper Outline Example (Abstract style)

Let’s say you did a research project on the effect of university online classes on attendance rates and create a simple outline example using these six questions:

1. Why did you decide to do what you did?

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many university courses around the world have been moved online, at least temporarily. Since students have been saving time on commuting, I wondered if attendance rates have increased overall.

2. What exactly did you do?

I compared attendance scores for courses that were taught both before (offline) and during (online) the COVID-19 pandemic at my university.

3. How did you do it?

I selected five popular subjects (business, law, medicine, psychology, art & design) and one general course per subject; then I contacted the professors in charge and asked them to provide me with anonymized attendance scores.

4. What did you find?

Attendance did not significantly change for medicine and law, but slightly dropped for the other three subjects. I found no difference between male and female students.  

5. What does it mean?

Even though students saved time on traveling between their homes and the campus during the COVID-19 pandemic, they did not attend classes more consistently; in some subjects, they missed more classes than before.

6. What should you/we/someone else do now?

Since I do not have any other information about the students, I can only speculate on potential explanations. Next, I will put together a questionnaire to assess how students have been coping with online classes and how the experiences from this time can benefit university teaching and learning in general.

Note that you could have made the same outline using just keywords instead of full sentences. You could also have added more methodological details or the results of your statistical analysis. However, when you can break everything down to the absolute essentials like this, you will have a good foundation upon which to develop a full paper. 

However, maybe your study just seems too complicated. So you look at these questions and then at your notes and data and have no idea how to come up with such simple answers. Or maybe things went in a completely different direction since you started writing your paper, so now you are no longer sure what the main point of your experiments was and what the main conclusion should be. If that is how you feel right now, then outlining your paper in “paper style” might be the right method for you.

Paper-Style Research Paper Outline Format 

The purpose of a paper-style outline is the same as that of an abstract-style outline: You want to organize your initial thoughts and plans, the methods and tools you used, all the experiments you conducted, the data you collected and analyzed, as well as your results, into a clear structure so that you can identify the main storyline for your paper and the main conclusions that you want the reader to take from it. 

First, take as much space as you need and simply jot down everything in your study you planned to do, everything you did, and everything you thought about based on your notes, lab book, and earlier literature you read or used. Such an outline can contain all your initial ideas, the timeline of all your pilots and all your experiments, the reasons why you changed direction or designed new experiments halfway through your study, all the analyses you ever did, all the feedback and criticism you already got from supervisors and seniors or during conference presentations, and all the ideas you have for future work. If this is your thesis or your first publication, then your first outline might look quite messy – and that is exactly why you need to structure your paper before trying to write everything up. 

So you have finally remembered all you have done in your study and have written everything down. The next step is to realize that you cannot throw all of this at the reader and expect them to put it together. You will have to create a story that is clear and consistent, contains all the essential information (and leaves out any that is not), and leads the reader the same way the abstract outline does, from why over what and how to what you found and what it all means . 

This does not mean you should suppress results that did not come out as intended or try to make your study look smoother. But the reader does not really need to know all the details about why you changed your research question after your initial literature search or some failed pilots. Instead of writing down the simple questions we used for the abstract outline, to organize your still messy notes, write down the main sections of the manuscript you are trying to put together. Additionally, include what kinds of information needs to go where in your paper’s structure.

1. Introduction Section:  

What field is your research part of?

What other papers did you read before deciding on your topic?

Who is your target audience and how much information do your readers need to understand where you are coming from? 

Can you summarize what you did in two sentences?

Did you have a clear hypothesis? If not, what were the potential outcomes of your work?

2. Methods Section: 

List all the methods, questionnaires, and tests you used.

Are your methods all standard in the field or do you need to explain them?

List everything chronologically or according to topics, whatever makes more sense. Read more about writing the Methods section if you need help with this important decision.

3. Results Section: 

Use the same timeline or topics you introduced in the method section.

Make sure you answer all the questions you raised in the introduction.

Use tables, graphs, and other visualizations to guide the reader.

Don’t present results of tests/analyses that you did not mention in the methods.

4. Discussion/Conclusion Section: 

Summarize quickly what you did and found but don’t repeat your results.

Explain whether your findings were to be expected, are new and surprising, are in line with the existing literature, or are contradicting some earlier work. 

Do you think your findings can be generalized? Can they be useful for people in certain professions or other fields?  

Does your study have limitations? What would you do differently next time? 

What future research do you think should be done based on your findings?

5. Conclusion Statement/Paragraph: 

This is your take-home message for the reader. Make sure that your conclusion is directly related to your initial research question.

Now you can simply reorganize your notes (if you use computer software) or fill in the different sections and cross out information on your original list. When you have used all your jotted notes, go through your new outline and check what is still missing. Now check once more that your conclusion is related to your initial research question. If that is the case, you are good to go. You can now either break your outline down further and shorten it into an abstract, or you can expand the different outline sections into a full article.

If you are a non-native speaker of English, then you might take notes in your mother language or maybe in different languages, read literature in your mother language, and generally not think in English while doing your research. If your goal is to write your thesis or paper in English, however, then our advice is to only use your mother language when listing keywords at the very beginning of the outlining process (if at all). As soon as you write down full sentences that you want to go into your paper eventually, you can save yourself a lot of work, avoid mistakes later in the process, and train your brain (which will help you immensely the next time you write an academic text), if you stick to English.

Another thing to keep in mind is that starting to write in full sentences too early in the process means that you might need to omit some passages (maybe even entire paragraphs) when you later decide to change the structure or storyline of your paper. Depending on how much you enjoy (or hate) writing in English and how much effort it costs you, having to throw away a perfectly fine paragraph that you invested a lot of time in can be incredibly frustrating. Our advice is therefore to not spend too much time on writing and to not get too attached to exact wording before you have a solid outline that you then only need to fill in and expand into a full paper.

Once you have finished drafting your paper, consider using professional proofreading and English editing service to revise your paper and prepare it for submission to journals. Wordvice offers a paper editing service , manuscript editing service , dissertation editing service , and thesis editing service to polish and edit your research work and correct any errors in style or formatting.

And while you draft your article, make use of Wordvice AI, a free AI Proofreader that identifies and fixes errors in punctuation, spelling, and grammar in any academic document. 

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How to Write an Outline in APA Format

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Amanda Tust is a fact-checker, researcher, and writer with a Master of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

• Before Starting Your Outline
• How to Create an Outline

Writing a psychology paper can feel like an overwhelming task. From picking a topic to finding sources to cite, each step in the process comes with its own challenges. Luckily, there are strategies to make writing your paper easier—one of which is creating an outline using APA format .

Here we share what APA format entails and the basics of this writing style. Then we get into how to create a research paper outline using APA guidelines, giving you a strong foundation to start crafting your content.

At a Glance

APA format is the standard writing style used for psychology research papers. Creating an outline using APA format can help you develop and organize your paper's structure, also keeping you on task as you sit down to write the content.

APA Format Basics

Formatting dictates how papers are styled, which includes their organizational structure, page layout, and how information is presented. APA format is the official style of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Learning the basics of APA format is necessary for writing effective psychology papers, whether for your school courses or if you're working in the field and want your research published in a professional journal. Here are some general APA rules to keep in mind when creating both your outline and the paper itself.

Font and Spacing

According to APA style, research papers are to be written in a legible and widely available font. Traditionally, Times New Roman is used with a 12-point font size. However, other serif and sans serif fonts like Arial or Georgia in 11-point font sizes are also acceptable.

APA format also dictates that the research paper be double-spaced. Each page has 1-inch margins on all sides (top, bottom, left, and right), and the page number is to be placed in the upper right corner of each page.

Both your psychology research paper and outline should include three key sections:

• Introduction : Highlights the main points and presents your hypothesis
• Body : Details the ideas and research that support your hypothesis
• Conclusion : Briefly reiterates your main points and clarifies support for your position

Headings and Subheadings

APA format provides specific guidelines for using headings and subheadings. They are:

• Main headings : Use Roman numerals (I, II, III, IV)
• Subheadings: Use capital letters (A, B, C, D)

If you need further subheadings within the initial subheadings, start with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3), then lowercase letters (a, b, c), then Arabic numerals inside parentheses [(1), (2), (3)]

Before Starting Your APA Format Outline

While APA format does not provide specific rules for creating an outline, you can still develop a strong roadmap for your paper using general APA style guidance. Prior to drafting your psychology research paper outline using APA writing style, taking a few important steps can help set you up for greater success.

Review Your Instructor's Requirements

Look over the instructions for your research paper. Your instructor may have provided some type of guidance or stated what they want. They may have even provided specific requirements for what to include in your outline or how it needs to be structured and formatted.

Some instructors require research paper outlines to use decimal format. This structure uses Arabic decimals instead of Roman numerals or letters. In this case, the main headings in an outline would be 1.0, 1.2, and 1.3, while the subheadings would be 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, and so on.

Consider Your Preferences

After reviewing your instructor's requirements, consider your own preferences for organizing your outline. Think about what makes the most sense for you, as well as what type of outline would be most helpful when you begin writing your research paper.

For example, you could choose to format your headings and subheadings as full sentences, or you might decide that you prefer shorter headings that summarize the content. You can also use different approaches to organizing the lettering and numbering in your outline's subheadings.

Whether you are creating your outline according to your instructor's guidelines or following your own organizational preferences, the most important thing is that you are consistent.

Formatting Tips

When getting ready to start your research paper outline using APA format, it's also helpful to consider how you will format it. Here are a few tips to help:

• Your outline should begin on a new page.
• Before you start writing the outline, check that your word processor does not automatically insert unwanted text or notations (such as letters, numbers, or bullet points) as you type. If it does, turn off auto-formatting.
• If your instructor requires you to specify your hypothesis in your outline, review your assignment instructions to find out where this should be placed. They may want it presented at the top of your outline, for example, or included as a subheading.

How to Create a Research Paper Outline Using APA

Understanding APA format basics can make writing psychology research papers much easier. While APA format does not provide specific rules for creating an outline, you can still develop a strong roadmap for your paper using general APA style guidance, your instructor's requirements, and your own personal organizational preferences.

Typically you won't need to turn your outline in with your final paper. But that doesn't mean you should skip creating one. A strong paper starts with a solid outline. Developing this outline can help you organize your writing and ensure that you effectively communicate your paper's main points and arguments. Here's how to create a research outline using APA format.

Start Your Research

While it may seem like you should create an outline before starting your research, the opposite is actually true. The information you find when researching your psychology research topic will start to reveal the information you'll want to include in your paper—and in your outline.

As you research, consider the main arguments you intend to make in your paper. Look for facts that support your hypothesis, keeping track of where you find these facts so you can cite them when writing your paper. The more organized you are when creating your outline, the easier it becomes to draft the paper itself.

If you are required to turn in your outline before you begin working on your paper, keep in mind that you may need to include a list of references that you plan to use.

Draft Your Outline Using APA Format

Once you have your initial research complete, you have enough information to create an outline. Start with the main headings (which are noted using Roman numerals I, II, III, etc.). Here's an example of the main headings you may use if you were writing an APA format outline for a research paper in support of using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxiety :

• Introduction
• What CBT Is
• How CBT Helps Ease Anxiety
• Research Supporting CBT for Anxiety
• Potential Drawbacks of CBT for Anxiety and How to Overcome Them

Under each main heading, list your main points or key ideas using subheadings (as noted with A, B, C, etc.). Sticking with the same example, subheadings under "What CBT Is" may include:

• Basic CBT Principles
• How CBT Works
• Conditions CBT Has Been Found to Help Treat

You may also decide to include additional subheadings under your initial subheadings to add more information or clarify important points relevant to your hypothesis. Examples of additional subheadings (which are noted with 1, 2, 3, etc.) that could be included under "Basic CBT Principles" include:

• Is Goal-Oriented
• Focuses on Problem-Solving
• Includes Self-Monitoring

Begin Writing Your Research Paper

The reason this step is included when drafting your research paper outline using APA format is that you'll often find that your outline changes as you begin to dive deeper into your proposed topic. New ideas may emerge or you may decide to narrow your topic further, even sometimes changing your hypothesis altogether.

All of these factors can impact what you write about, ultimately changing your outline. When writing your paper, there are a few important points to keep in mind:

• Follow the structure that your instructor specifies.
• Present your strongest points first.
• Support your arguments with research and examples.
• Organize your ideas logically and in order of strength.
• Keep track of your sources.
• Present and debate possible counterarguments, and provide evidence that counters opposing arguments.

Update Your Final Outline

The final version of your outline should reflect your completed draft. Not only does updating your outline at this point help ensure that you've covered the topics you want in your paper, but it also gives you another opportunity to verify that your paper follows a logical sequence.

When reading through your APA-formatted outline, consider whether it flows naturally from one topic to the next. You wouldn't talk about how CBT works before discussing what CBT is, for example. Taking this final step can give you a more solid outline, and a more solid research paper.

American Psychological Association. About APA Style .

Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Types of outlines and samples .

Mississippi College. Writing Center: Outlines .

American Psychological Association. APA style: Style and Grammar Guidelines .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

APA Research Paper Outline: Examples and Template

Table of contents

• 1 Why Is Research Paper Format Necessary?
• 2.1 Purpose of research paper outline
• 2.2 APA outline example
• 3.1 APA paper outline example
• 3.2 Introduction:
• 3.4 Conclusion:
• 4 The Basic APA Outline Format
• 5 APA Style Outline Template Breakdown
• 6.1 APA Research Paper Outline Example
• 6.2 APA Paper Outline Format Example
• 7.1 First Paragraph: Hook and Thesis
• 7.2 Main Body
• 7.3 Conclusion
• 7.4 Decimal APA outline format example
• 7.5 Decimal APA outline format layout
• 8.1 A definite goal
• 8.2 Division
• 8.3 Parallelism
• 8.4 Coordination
• 8.5 Subordination
• 8.6 Avoid Redundancy
• 8.7 Wrap it up in a good way
• 8.8 Conclusion

Formatting your paper in APA can be daunting if this is your first time. The American Psychological Association (APA) offers a guide or rules to follow when conducting projects in the social sciences or writing papers. The standard APA fromat a research paper outline includes a proper layout from the title page to the final reference pages. There are formatting samples to create outlines before writing a paper. Amongst other strategies, creating an outline is the easiest way to APA format outline template.

Why Is Research Paper Format Necessary?

Consistency in the sequence, structure, and format when writing a research paper encourages readers to concentrate on the substance of a paper rather than how it is presented. The requirements for paper format apply to student assignments and papers submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed publication. APA paper outline template style may be used to create a website, conference poster, or PowerPoint presentation . If you plan to use the style for other types of work like a website, conference poster, or even PowerPoint presentation, you must format your work accordingly to adjust to requirements. For example, you may need different line spacing and font sizes. Follow the formatting rules provided by your institution or publication to ensure its formatting standards are followed as closely as possible. However, to logically structure your document, you need a research paper outline in APA format. You may ask: why is it necessary to create an outline for an APA research paper?

Concept & Purposes of Research Paper Outline

A path, direction, or action plan! Writing short essays without a layout may seem easy, but not for 10,000 or more words. Yet, confusing a table of contents with an outline is a major issue. The table of contents is an orderly list of all the chapters’ front matter, primary, and back matter. It includes sections and, often, figures in your work, labeled by page number. On the other hand, a research APA-style paper outline is a proper structure to follow.

Purpose of research paper outline

An outline is a formalized essay in which you give your own argument to support your point of view. And when you write your apa outline template, you expand on what you already know about the topic. Academic writing papers examine an area of expertise to get the latest and most accurate information to work on that topic. It serves various purposes, including:

• APA paper outline discusses the study’s core concepts.
• The research paper outlines to define the link between your ideas and the thesis.
• It provides you with manageable portions that you can handle.
• The research paper’s APA outline enables the detection of structural faults or gaps.
• As shown in the example, it must clearly comprehend the subject at hand.

APA outline example

This research paper outline example will guide you in formatting the layout for a clear direction to work on. It eliminates the inconsistency along with lacking proper substance in the paper.

Understanding the APA Outline Format

It would not be wrong to say there is no standard outline format. The official publishing handbook does not give precise guidelines for preparing an outline. But, it requires certain basic guidelines to follow regarding typeface, font size, structure, margins, etc.

APA paper outline example

Moreover, the final shape of your work relies on your instructor’s specifications and your particular preferences for APA citation format. Though, it would be better to follow some standards for formatting your outline, for instance:

Times New Roman is a widely accessible standard typeface for an APA essay format in 12-point font. However, serif and sans serif fonts like Arial and Georgia are acceptable in font size 11pt.

The text of your paper format should be double-spaced.

The primary headlines use Roman and Arabic numerals to write an outline.

Headings & Subheadings

While writing an APA essay, there are particular standards for utilizing headings in your outline: I – Main headings are numbered by Roman numerals like I, II, III, IV A  – Subheadings are numbered with Capital letters (A, B, C, D) 1  – The APA outline uses Arabic numerals (1-9 type numbers) within those subheadings. a  – Below Arabic number subheadings, lower-case letters are used (a, b, a). [1] – Headings below those subheadings use Arabic numbers enclosed in parenthesis.

APA format offers a standard layout for each paper, such as

• 1-inch margins on the top, bottom, left, and right.
• The page number on the upper right corner.

The structure of writing an outline consists of three major sections:

• Introduction

Introduction:

This section highlights crucial background information.

Explain the primary points that support your ideas.

Conclusion:

• Summarize your key arguments.
• Explain how these concepts support your ultimate stance, as shown in APA outline example below.

An outline in APA has three common formats that vary in the numeric sequence of all. To make it easier for you, we have compiled all three templates. You can format your document using these examples for added coherence and structure.

The Basic APA Outline Format

APA Style Outline Template Breakdown

Numbering the APA style format follows five levels of headings that use different alphabets and numbers. For instance, I – Headings use Roman numerals like I, II, and III. A – CAPITAL ALPHABETS”, such as A, B, C, etc. 1 – Headings and subheadings use Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3). a – If there are further headings (the fourth level), use lower-case alphabets. [1] – Headings below that (the fifth level) use Arabic numerals enclosed in parentheses, such as [1], [2], [3].

Full Sentence Outline Format

As the name specifies, the full-sentence style outline format requires every line to be a proper sentence. Full-sentence APA style outline is best recommended for essays and speeches. It gives your writing process an idea or a logical path to follow.

APA Research Paper Outline Example

If you are looking for how to write a research paper outline APA in Full Sentence Format, here is an example:

Full Sentence APA format heading utilizes Roman numerals I, II, and III. Every heading must be a full sentence. Here is an APA style paper outline template for the full-sentence format that will clear all your confusion on how to write an outline in full-sentence format.

APA Paper Outline Format Example

I. Introduction

III. Conclusion

Decimal Outline Format

The decimal outline format for APA research papers differs from other formats. The decimal APA style is simple and uses paragraphs for structure. It contains three main paragraphs, introduction, main body, and conclusion.

First Paragraph: Hook and Thesis

• The first paragraph is a sentence or two that introduces the central concept of your article.
• Introduce your topic or subject of study where your research is applicable as a context for further research.
• Explain why the mentioned issue is essential or relevant to the audience.
• A thesis statement is a claim that you make throughout your whole essay.
• The topic phrase is the first point in any writing to support a thesis statement.
• Give an explanation or provide evidence to support your point.
• Provide verifiable facts, figures, and/or citations from credible sources in your writing. It helps in the substantiating assertion.
• Include as many supporting statements and related evidence in your decimal outline.

Finally, when you write an outline, provide a concluding remark to support your claims.

Decimal APA outline format example

1.0 The main heading 1.1 Subheading under the main heading 1.2 Second digit is represented by subheadings under the main headings 1.2.1 Further division adds another digit in decimal format 1.2.2 You can number them as per the number of paragraphs or points, or lines An easy way to write in decimal APA outline format is to remember the structure, i.e.; 1.1.1 = Heading.Paragraph.Sentence/point under paragraph.”

Decimal APA outline format layout

1.0 Main heading 1.1 First paragraph for first heading. 1.2 Second paragraph for first heading. 1.2.1 First point or sentence for the second paragraph. 2.0 Second heading 2.1 Second heading, first paragraph. 2.2 Second heading, second paragraph. 2.2.1 Second, heading, second paragraph, first sentence, or point. 3.0 Decimal working 3.1 You must remember that each digit represents a segment. 3.2 It is easier to remember the placement of numbers. 3.2.1 First digit represents the heading 3.2.2 Second digit represents the paragraph under the main heading <3.2.3 The third digit represents any point or sentence under the paragraph.

Tips for Writing an Outline: Organize Your Ideas

You may feel it is easier to write without outlines, but once you start writing, organizing your ideas or thoughts becomes hard. Even if you have some fantastic ideas, producing an engaging story is practically hard. If you are not first creating an outline or conceptual guides while writing a research paper, you may lose track. A well-written outline is essential in completing your paper and maintaining quality. Establishing your point in paper writing is easy if you create an outline first. You can find an APA research paper outline template that best suits your requirement. Moreover, these tips can help you polish your writing. These tips and sample papers can help you write outstanding outlines without making any hassle.

A definite goal

For better expression, make a list of primary objectives on a title page in a single phrase or less. Your goal should be specific and measurable. If it is too broad or imprecise, you will not achieve anything. If you are working on a large paper format that covers a variety of themes or topics, you may have a more general purpose in mind. But, if you plan to write an essay, the aim should be as specific and clear as possible to be effective.

Breaking things up rather than allowing them to become verbose is known as the division rule. Make sure that each subsection in the document corresponds to its parent heading. If it doesn’t compare to the section, removing it or moving it to another location is better.

Parallelism

It is mainly related to the consistency and structure of the document. It keeps your paper’s layout tidy and also ensures relevancy. For instance, if you begin one heading with a verb, make sure all other headings and subheadings also start with a verb.

Coordination

Having headings aligned is critical to creating a well-organized outline. This rule also applies to subheadings, which is a good thing. If one title is less important than another, consider changing your layout by incorporating it into a subsection instead.

Subordination

Subordination deals with maintaining a connection between your paper’s headings and subheadings. It helps in the proper sequencing of headings and subheadings. Headings should be broad at the outset. At the same time, the subheadings become more particular as they go further into the document.

Avoid Redundancy

While writing a paper outline, look through it many times and cross out any items that aren’t necessary or have no significance. While outlining, make sure to be specific and concise. It will prevent you from adding information that does not supporting your final essay. Remove all the extra information and points while c that weighs you down while you write.

Wrap it up in a good way

Creating an outline does not only help in writing a coherent term paper, but it also helps in ending with precise understanding. Be considerate of your audience’s time and effort when you write an outline in APA, and ensure it serves its purpose. If you still have any doubts about formatting your paper outline, you can use this APA-style research paper outline template to write your document. We have provided Outline Format Example for every style.

People find it hard to write an outline in APA, but if you are aware of the requirements and structure, it’s no breeze. Sometimes, your instructor may alter your paper format by introducing or removing existing sections. As a result, if you come across any templates for an outline in APA, pay close attention to them. If you are looking for a quick answer to how to outline an APA paper, here’s a standard logical sequence of typical parts to include when writing an outline in APA:

• Thesis statement
• Techniques employed
• Body of paper
• Conclusions section
• List of references

A well-written outline is an excellent tool for presenting an outstanding paper. Including the key components while writing an outline for a research paper is necessary.

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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by research, not knowing how to start or structure your thoughts effectively?

You're not alone in facing this problem. The challenge of disorganized research is something many students deal with. But don't worry! 

In this blog, we'll not only tell you how to create your research paper outline, but we’ve included some downloadable templates as well.

We'll provide a practical step-by-step solution for organizing your research material so you end with a well-structured research paper. By the end of the blog, you'll understand why outlines matter and how to create compelling research papers.

So, keep reading to learn more!

• 1. What is a Research Paper Outline?
• 2. Different Research Paper Outline Formats
• 3. Steps to Create a Research Paper Outline
• 4. Research Paper Outline Example

What is a Research Paper Outline?

A research paper outline serves as a systematic framework for your paper. It's a structured strategy that assists in the organization of your thoughts and ideas before the writing process begins. 

The outline structures out the main sections, subtopics, and supporting details in your research paper. In essence, it offers a well-structured and coherent roadmap for the entirety of your paper, maintaining academic rigor and clarity.

Different Research Paper Outline Formats

When it comes to creating a research paper outline, you've got options. Let's explore a few different formats that you can choose from:

Numeric Outline

A numeric outline is a structured organizational format for planning a research paper. 

It uses a numerical system to represent the hierarchy of ideas, with each main section or point numbered and subpoints or details indicated by decimal numbers. Numeric outlines are useful for presenting information in a clear and logical sequence.

Here’s a sample research paper outline template for this format:

Alphanumeric Outline

An alphanumeric outline is a hierarchical structure used to outline a research paper, combining numbers and letters to signify the different levels of information. 

Main sections are designated with capital letters (A, B, C), which include major points, while subpoints are indicated by numbers and lowercase letters (1, 2, a, b). Alphanumeric outlines help writers organize complex topics and subtopics effectively.

Here’s a sample sample research paper outline for this format:

Full Sentence Outline

A full-sentence outline is a method of planning a research paper in which each point in the outline is presented as a complete sentence or phrase. 

It provides a detailed overview of the content and structure of the paper. Full-sentence outlines are particularly helpful for writers who prefer thorough planning and want to capture the essence of each section or point.

Here’s a research paper outline format for full sentences:

Steps to Create a Research Paper Outline

Creating a research paper outline doesn't have to be complicated. Follow these simple steps to get started:

Step 1: Choose Your Research Topic

Begin by selecting a research topic that is both interesting to you and relevant to your assignment or academic objectives. Your chosen topic will serve as the foundation for your entire research paper.

Step 2: Identify Your Main Sections

Determine the main sections or chapters your research paper will include. These are the broad thematic areas that will structure your paper, and they provide a high-level overview of the topics you plan to cover. Here are the main sections a typical research paper involves:

• Title Page: This is the first page and includes the paper's title, author's name, institutional affiliation, and often the running head.
• Abstract : A concise summary of the paper, usually around 150-250 words, providing an overview of the research, its key findings, and implications.
• Introduction: Sets the stage for your research, offering background information and a thesis statement , which is a central argument or hypothesis.
• Literature Review : A comprehensive analysis of existing research and literature on your topic, demonstrating your understanding of the subject.
• Methodology: Explain the research methods, data collection techniques, and analytical tools used in your study.
• Findings: Presents the research results in a structured manner, often including data, tables, or charts.
• Discussion: Interpretation of the findings and their implications, offering insights into the research's significance.
• Conclusion: Summarizes the main points, reiterates the thesis, and discusses potential future research directions.
• References: A list of all sources cited in your paper, following a specific citation style (e.g., APA, MLA).

Step 3: Break It Down into Subtopics

Under each main section, further divide your content into smaller subtopics. Subtopics are like the building blocks of your paper; they represent the key points or ideas you intend to explore within each main section.

Step 4: Add Supporting Details

For each subtopic, include supporting details, facts, examples, or arguments that bolster your point. These supporting details form the substance of your paper and provide evidence for your claims or arguments.

Step 5: Organize Your Points

Organize your main sections, subtopics, and supporting details in a logical order that flows smoothly from one point to the next. This step ensures that your research paper maintains coherence and readability.

Step 6: Use Numbers or Letters

To enhance clarity within your outline, use numbering, a lettering system, or Roman numerals. Use numerical sequencing for main sections (e.g., "1.," "2.," "3.") and a combination of numbers and letters for subtopics (e.g., "1.1," "1.2," "2.1").

Step 7: Stay Flexible

Recognize that your outline is not set in stone. As you conduct research and begin writing, your ideas may evolve, and you may discover the need to adjust your outline accordingly. Embrace this flexibility to adapt to new insights and information.

By following these steps, you'll create a well-structured research paper outline that serves as a roadmap for your writing journey. It keeps your research organized and makes writing easier, resulting in a more effective paper.

Research Paper Outline Example

A research paper outline could be created in several different ways. Here is a sample research paper outline for a quick review:

Here are some more examples for different formats and subjects:

APA Research Paper Outline PDF

College Research Paper Outline

Argumentative Research Paper Outline

Sample Research Paper Outline

History Research Paper Outline

Research Paper Outline MLA

Research Paper Outline with Annotated Bibliography

Need to consult more examples? Have a look at these top-quality research paper examples and get inspiration!

In conclusion, with the help of these example templates and our step-by-step guide on creating an outline, you're now well-prepared to create an effective one. 

If you're in a hurry and want to skip the outlining process, our essay writing service is here to help!

You can get our team of expert essay writers to assist you at any stage of your research or to deliver a well-formatted, accurate research paper. 

So, just say, write my research paper or ' write an essay for me ' and we’ll deliver an original, top-quality paper to you!

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Types of Outlines and Samples

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Alphanumeric Outlines

This is the most common type of outline and usually instantly recognizable to most people. The formatting follows these characters, in this order:

• Roman Numerals
• Capitalized Letters
• Arabic Numerals
• Lowercase Letters

If the outline needs to subdivide beyond these divisions, use Arabic numerals inside parentheses and then lowercase letters inside parentheses. Select the "Sample Outlines" PDF in the Media Box above to download the sample of this outline.

The sample PDF in the Media Box above is an example of an outline that a student might create before writing an essay. In order to organize her thoughts and make sure that she has not forgotten any key points that she wants to address, she creates the outline as a framework for her essay.

What is the assignment?

Your instructor asks the class to write an expository (explanatory) essay on the typical steps a high school student would follow in order to apply to college.

What is the purpose of this essay?

To explain the process for applying to college

Who is the intended audience for this essay?

High school students intending to apply to college and their parents

What is the essay's thesis statement?

When applying to college, a student follows a certain process which includes choosing the right schools and preparing the application materials.

Full Sentence Outlines

The full sentence outline format is essentially the same as the Alphanumeric outline. The main difference (as the title suggests) is that full sentences are required at each level of the outline. This outline is most often used when preparing a traditional essay. Select the "Sample Outlines" PDF in the Media Box above to download the sample of this outline.

Decimal Outlines

The decimal outline is similar in format to the alphanumeric outline. The added benefit is a system of decimal notation that clearly shows how every level of the outline relates to the larger whole. Select the "Sample Outlines" PDF in the Media Box above to download the sample of this outline.

Trump fired his boss in 2020. Now, this Gen Z candidate is up against a fake elector

Ashwin Ramaswami, 24, was an intern in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency when former President Donald Trump fired his boss in late 2020 for publicly disputing Trump's claims of voter fraud in the election.

Now, Ramaswami, a Democrat, is running for Georgia state Senate in District 48 against Shawn Still, the Republican incumbent − and a Trump ally who was indicted last year for allegedly posing as a fake elector to try and overturn the 2020 election.

The Indian American Gen Z candidate, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary Tuesday, launched his campaign last year, telling USA TODAY in an interview that protecting the legitimacy of election results and a person's right to their vote is what inspired him to run in his home state of Georgia, where Trump has been indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on allegations that he tried to wipe out Biden's victory in the state through the use of fake electors and by pressuring state officials.

“The message…is this idea of the next generation of folks taking stuff into their own hands and really saying that we will stand up for integrity and honesty in politics in a way that too often a lot of people running for office don’t really do,” Ramaswami said.

And he believes he has a shot to take Still out of office by vigorously campaigning on the message of saving a democracy in peril because of Trump - among other issues - and gathering up a broad coalition of voters to support him in the coming months. 

Ramaswami’s campaign has vastly outraised Still’s in the latest filing period between Feb. 1 and April 30, with Ramaswami raising $146,442 and Still raising only $6,400. Since he launched his campaign in December of last year, Ramaswami raised over $282,000, with only $8,066 of that being self-funded. 

But Ramaswami as a first-time political candidate faces challenges if he wants to defeat his opponent, including appealing to voters in a district that has been redrawn to favor Republicans, political science experts said. 

Election integrity, democracy at the forefront of this fight

Though Ramaswami is stumping on other issues, such as the economy and healthcare, at the core of his fight against Still is preserving election integrity. 

A poll conducted by Marist College between March 11 and March 14 among 1,283 Georgia adults ages 18 and older found that 25% of respondents say preserving democracy is their top issue when thinking about casting a ballot in November, followed by 24% citing immigration, 24% mentioning inflation and 10% saying healthcare. Eight percent of respondents chose abortion as their top issue while 7% chose crime and 1% are unsure.

The poll also found that 69% of Georgia adults are confident or very confident that their state or local government will run a fair and accurate election, with 30% not very confident or not confident at all.

“It’s important for our representatives to respect our vote,” said Ramaswami. “What Shawn Still did and what the fake electors did undermined the power of all Georgians.” 

Ramaswami previously served as an intern and later part-time paid employee at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, where he worked under former director Christopher Krebs and helped states find and fix vulnerabilities in election systems. His research on the role of technology and social media in the spread of election misinformation has also been published in several papers.

He decided to run against Still after the Georgia lawmaker was indicted last year by a grand jury for allegedly signing a certificate falsely declaring that Trump won the state of Georgia in the 2020 election and acting as a "duly elected and qualified" presidential elector.

Still was charged with seven counts, including violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act which targets people engaged in organized crime. 

Still has pleaded not guilty. The case has yet to go to trial. His legal team has argued that the state has no "authority or jurisdiction" to prosecute Still for his "actions as a contingent presidential elector" and that the indictment violates his First Amendment rights. They even moved to quash the indictment last year.

USA TODAY reached out to Still for an interview request, but did not immediately receive a response.

Does Ramaswami have a chance against Still?

As a political newcomer, the path for Ramaswami to defeat Still might be tough.

“Given his youth, this may be more of a dry run for the future,” said Carl Cavalli, a professor of political science at the University of North Georgia. 

Still, according to his website, has authored and sponsored more than 100 pieces of legislation. He’s also serving as the vice chairman of the state and local governmental operations Senate committee and the secretary of the natural resources and environment Senate committee. 

In his second term, Still hopes to tackle immigration reform, environmental legislation, workforce development, tightening up election integrity laws and other issues, according to a statement on his website.

But Ramaswami believes that he can bring new perspective to the state legislature, arguing that “I do want to focus on a lot of issues…whether it’s more access to education, expanding access to health care, reproductive rights - all the things which the Republican majority in the Georgia State Senate kind of isn’t really working on."

He added that Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff's team has been helpful for advice and connecting him with folks who can support his campaign. Ossoff gained national attention as the youngest sitting senator since 2021 and could serve as a role model for Ramaswami.

The makeup of District 48 is another challenge. David Shafer, an indicted Trump ally and former Georgia GOP chair, held the District 48 state senate seat from 2002 to 2019. Two Democrats held the seat after: Zahra Karinshak and Michelle Au. 

However, the district was redrawn after the 2020 election which made it more heavily favor Republicans, said Charles S. Bullock II, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia. After redistricting, Still won the seat in the 2022 midterms by 13% against his Democratic opponent at the time, Josh Uddin.

"Ramaswami is facing an uphill battle in a Republican area," said Cavalli.

But though the physical outline of the district remains the same this year as Ramaswami competes against Still, Bullock said that what Democrats are hoping could give them an upper hand is the demographic change in the district that has been taking place over the years as an influx of diverse groups move in the area.

For instance, the southernmost precincts in the district are voting Democratic as a growing Indian population moves into south Forsyth County, he said. And a key constituency in the district is college educated White voters who are less likely to accept Republican claims that the 2020 election was stolen, he added.

“Bottom line: Ramaswami has a chance in November,” Bullock said.

Can Online Music Platforms Be Fair? An Interdisciplinary Research Manifesto

• Open access
• Published: 07 February 2024
• Volume 55 , pages 249–279, ( 2024 )

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• Giuseppe Mazziotti 1 &
• Heritiana Ranaivoson 2  

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 26 February 2024

This article has been updated

In this article we present a manifesto for research into the complex interplay between social media, music streaming services, and their algorithms, which are reshaping the European music industry – a sector that has transitioned from ownership to access-based models. Our focus is to assess whether the current digital economy supports a fair and sustainable development for cultural and creative industries. The manifesto is designed to pave the way for a comprehensive analysis. We begin with the context of our research by briefly examining the de-materialisation of the music industry and the critical role of proprietary algorithms in organising and ranking creative works. We then scrutinise the notion of “fairness” within digital markets, a concept that is attracting increasing policy interest in the EU. We believe that, for “fairness” to be effective, the main inquiry around this concept – especially as regards remuneration of music creators – must be necessarily interdisciplinary. This presupposes collaboration across complementary fields to address gaps and inconsistencies in the understanding of how these platforms influence music creation and consumption and whether these environments and technologies should be regulated. We outline how interdisciplinary expertise (political science, law, economics, and computer science) can enhance the current understanding of “fairness” within Europe’s cultural policies and help address policy challenges. The article details how our research plan will unfold across various disciplinary hubs of a Horizon Europe project ( Fair MusE ) that aims to explore the challenges and opportunities of today’s digital music landscape. The plan culminates in the integration of these hubs’ findings to deliver “key exploitable results”.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

The exponential growth of social media and streaming services, and the fast-growing influence of their algorithms and data infrastructures, raise questions as to whether today’s digital economy will allow the cultural and creative industries (CCIs), and especially the music ecosystem, to develop in a fair and sustainable way, at least for most authors and performers. The digital revolution has done much more than just simplify content dissemination and enable content production to reach unprecedented scales. Digital technologies have broadened the notion of “creation” itself, which ranges from traditional works of composers, performers, record labels, and broadcasters to new forms of musical and music-based creativity that digital settings, social media, and artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled. These new forms and trends include the streaming of live music events and home-made creations that became even more appealing and diffused due to the COVID-19 health emergency and the ensuing long-term restrictions on the performing arts. In this scenario, the commercial power of a handful of very large tech companies increased significantly. These companies can be identified, at least in part, with the owners of the “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) Footnote 1 under Art. 33 of the DSA and with providers of core platform services according to the notion embodied in the DMA. Footnote 2 The ability of these companies to control access to unprecedented volumes of creative works and, at the same time, creators’ ability to reach and develop potential audiences raises existential questions for Europe’s policymakers and the CCIs, including players such as radio, TV broadcasters, and the market for live performance exploitations.

This paper takes the form of a manifesto to advocate a new, interdisciplinary research approach that can remedy the shortcomings of a purely doctrinal and scientifically segregated (i.e. “silo-like”) analysis of EU cultural and industrial policies in the music sector and of their effective impact in today’s platform- and algorithm-dominated economy. In our view, only a well-designed combination of distinct and complementary disciplines can test methodologically and verify empirically whether the EU’s policy changes in copyright law and recent EU regulations (Digital Services Act – DSA – and Digital Markets Act – DMA) seeking to curb the exceptional power of VLOPs are justified and suitable for today’s internet. To this end, we authored a research proposal and built an EU-wide interdisciplinary group of academics and industry partners whose consortium – Fair MusE Footnote 3 – received funding from the EC/REA’s Horizon Europe program. The group’s principal investigators are experts in the fields of law, economics, political science, and computer science and have a consolidated leadership in developing projects of international relevance and solid connections with policymakers and industry.

The predominantly academic character of this consortium Footnote 4 aims at guaranteeing the highest quality and independence of the proposed research. The consortium composition seeks to prevent conflicts of interests which would inevitably arise in our view if, due to the project’s mission, the consortium incorporated industry partners (such as a major record publisher or label, an online music service provider, or a social media platform owner) that would pursue their own corporate interests. This could hinder, or even distort, the results of the empirical research concerning data and confidential information Fair MusE has envisaged. To prevent this risk while still being able to engage in “co-creation” of tools for policymakers and the music industry together with CCIs, our consortium incorporates industry partners which have an interest in promoting fairness in music ecosystems: (i) an Italian composers’ collecting society (SIAE), which is broadly representative of Italian composers and whose repertoire is strong at the local level but not mainstream at the international level; Footnote 5 and (ii) a UK-based company (Verifi Media Ltd) that is currently leading the market development of rights data management services for the music industry, including data collaboration and sharing, which are a prerequisite for market transparency for both creators and exploiters of digital music. Footnote 6

Our manifesto is based on Fair MusE’s main research proposal and puts forward a novel approach to address the European idea of a “fair” digital society and of fair digital markets in the music sector in an extensive and integrated manner. Such a necessity is even more compelling at the European level if we consider that the notion of “fairness” is currently being used in several policy areas. Footnote 7 Considering that fairness is designed to support cultural creation in today’s fast-changing, very broad, and increasingly AI-dominated music ecosystems, independent research should give this concept a more tangible and measurable dimension. Our manifesto and its potential outcomes aim at pursuing this goal and making policymakers, stakeholders, and the general public more aware of the risks that creators’ lack of appropriate remuneration as well as platforms’ algorithm-based and non-transparent exploitations of creative works pose to music’s sustainability and diversity.

The manifesto is organised as follows. Section 2 briefly summarises how the music industry has progressively de-materialised over the past three decades and gone from ownership-based to access-centred business models where streaming services and social media platforms organise and rank sound recordings on the grounds of their (secret) algorithms. Section 3 lists complementary disciplines and methods that are necessary to perform effective and independent research activities focused on whether music platforms can function fairly, especially for music creators. This section identifies gaps in the literature and shows how interdisciplinary research can go beyond the state of the art and help resolve persisting policy dilemmas in this field. Section 4 describes the main contents and purposes of our manifesto while drawing on the emerging notion of fairness in EU music policymaking and other policy fields. Section 5 details how we see our ideas being put into practice in Fair MusE’s research proposal and concrete set of activities.

2 Evolution of the Music Industry and Its Current Dependence on Platforms

The music industry, more than other sectors, has gone through radical changes in the past two decades. These have been even more difficult to face because of the extreme fragmentation of the rights, business interests, and artistic prerogatives that characterise the related creative communities. When the internet first emerged in the mid-1990s, the end-to-end architecture of this new medium and the fast development of file-sharing software enabled internet users to access and exchange large amounts of recorded music without intermediation. Free and uncompensated file sharing threatened the survival of the music industry for almost a decade, given that it had the potential to replace physical formats like CDs, which were the core business of the industry. Footnote 8 Since the early 2000s, proprietary online platforms have dramatically changed content distribution models and made music materials ubiquitous in the online environment. Although unauthorised file-sharing continued, becoming even more efficient and sophisticated, an unstoppable evolution of the internet infrastructure in terms of bandwidth and connectivity enabled companies to launch on-demand music stores, such as iTunes, which Apple released in 2001. iTunes was the first service that made digital music marketable by successfully creating its own ecosystem based on proprietary technologies for computers and portable devices. Streaming services like Spotify and Deezer as well as social media platforms like YouTube emerged at a later stage, which consolidated both a trajectory of music consumption from an ownership to an access model as well as a process of online re-intermediation for the whole internet and, even more so, for digital music distribution. This platform-centred environment has allowed music right-holders to start licensing their works and earn remuneration from the technology companies that exploited their music. Despite this evolution, music right-holders’ communities claim not only that the value of their works has been disrupted by a platform-dominated economy but also that a “value gap” exists between the remuneration they earn from music streaming services and social media platforms. Footnote 9

Our interdisciplinary research agenda seeks to understand and illustrate, in an autonomous and evidence-based way, the consequences that the various business models deployed by the largest digital music platforms have had as far as music production, distribution, and consumption processes are concerned. These complex environments are deeply influencing the economic and social value of this art form, in ways which are often contradictory from a public policy perspective. On the one hand, platforms have effectively enabled new forms of music production and home-made creations that empower amateur, early career, or disenfranchised categories of authors (“professionalising amateurs”) to gain online exposure and eventually establish themselves as music professionals. Footnote 10 On the other hand, these algorithm-dominated businesses seem to have induced a significant impoverishment of creators, especially those of niche or marginal repertoires that are penalised by the logic of filter bubbles and recommender systems.

The above-mentioned scenario has led to significant reforms of legal and regulatory frameworks that aim to govern and shape European music ecosystems. The most significant among these adaptations are embodied in Directive 2019/790: Footnote 11

This directive seeks to protect the commercial value of copyright works – in particular recorded music – by making providers of online sharing content services directly liable for works their users make available. Footnote 12 This policy change represents a turn away from the legal principle of platform neutrality that EU lawmakers maintained for nearly two decades to stimulate the growth of a robust internet infrastructure. In reversing this principle, the legal provision aimed at obliging social media companies to obtain licences and to implement content identification technologies that can either restrict access to unauthorised works or help copyright holders to be remunerated for online exploitation of their works.

A second, potentially very impactful change is condensed into Chapter 3 of the directive, where the law codifies a principle of fair and proportionate remuneration for authors and performers, in particular with regard to online music exploitations, Footnote 13 and a right to receive – on a regular basis – timely, accurate, relevant, and comprehensive information on modes of exploitation of their works, direct and indirect revenues generated, as well as any remuneration due. Footnote 14

We believe that both these policy changes constitute a turning point or even a “big bang” in the European history of copyright and artists’ rights, whose real effects are yet to be evaluated in a non-doctrinal and evidence-based way. This has not happened yet because of the very slow transposition of these provisions into national laws and an approach to academic research on these reforms that we find incomplete, too abstract and ideological, and discipline-segregated (“silo-like”).

3 Advancing Complementary Disciplinary Expertise to Go Beyond the State of the Art

Our research presupposes the identification of disciplines that can eventually enable independent scholars to fully understand the consequences of market-driven and legislative changes in Europe’s music ecosystem, going beyond the state of the art in measuring and enhancing the impact of the main EU policymaking initiatives in this field. While the music industry has been analysed from an economic perspective, Footnote 15 we believe that these analyses should be strongly connected to political, legal, and technical investigations and a thorough empirical exploration of the societal impact of music platforms on European music creators and audiences. In the following subsections we seek to identify gaps in the literature and illustrate how research can produce new knowledge to the benefit of policymakers, stakeholders, and society at large.

3.1 Politics: The EU as a Policymaker in the Music Industry

Despite a series of thoughtful studies on EU cultural-media policies, Footnote 16 there has so far been no comprehensive attempt to examine and critically assess the ways in which EU policy and law have sought to cope with the notion and the goal of fairness in the music sector, the values underpinning the policy instruments introduced (market vs. non-market values), and the objectives pursued. We believe that the first pillar of an effective research agenda in this field should be a comprehensive policy analysis of different EU initiatives that relate to the music sector. We need such an exhaustive analysis to understand the origin, nature, breadth, and degree of policy changes towards the governance of online platforms in Europe and the implications for the music ecosystem. This endeavour shall consist in scrutinising several policy instruments, proposals, and reports, including key documents related to “Music Moves Europe”, that the EU has issued in the past three decades. Footnote 17

Our analysis will focus predominantly on three issues that have dominated debates on online platforms and EU music governance in the past few years: (i) the availability and prominence of local and national music content online; (ii) the rights for creators in relation to the use of their music works by online service providers; and (iii) a fair and proportionate remuneration of music creators. Our team will engage in a historical analysis covering a span of 30 years of EU policy initiatives in this sector to understand the nature and breadth of policy changes towards the governance of music streaming and social media platforms, including the latest tweaks that specifically regard fairness and transparency. This analysis will also help us address the way EU governance rules seek to promote fairness in an economy where platforms’ dominance was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that an in-depth understanding of these changes is essential for policymakers as well as key digital industry players and music associations to assess the pros and cons of an increasingly pervasive dimension of EU law where copyright, contract law, and various forms of platform regulation are used to govern the extended landscape of business models and music professionals that characterises the platform economy. This unprecedented policy analysis can produce, in our view, new knowledge on the impact of online platforms and of phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic on music production and dissemination and thus contribute to finding solutions with a clear potential to bolster fairness.

3.2 Law: Copyright, Contract Law, and Platform Liability

Despite the adoption of the DSA and its broad attempt to introduce new obligations for VLOPs, the most important form of regulation aimed at helping music right-holders exercise their rights in the social media landscape is Art. 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive. Footnote 18 This provision aims at setting a new standard of copyright liability applicable to social media platforms and at excluding the (previously uncertain) application of liability exemptions embodied in Directive 2000/31 (e-Commerce Directive). Footnote 19 Since it was included (as Art. 13) in the EU Commission’s directive proposal in September 2016, this provision has been the target of an endless number of academic articles, studies, parliament interrogations, open letters, popular petitions, and other initiatives that aimed at flagging the “negatives” of the complex legal mechanism it incorporates, especially for the protection of freedom of expression and “internet freedom”. Footnote 20 The volume and the strength of this critical movement increased, and became even more apparent, as soon as the EU Member States started transposing this provision in a rather inhomogeneous, scattered, and (mostly) untimely manner. Footnote 21 Such a broadly shared and vehement attack on this provision found its point of sublimation in the appeal brought by the Republic of Poland against Art. 17 before the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which the Court eventually rejected. Footnote 22

Our research agenda, while duly considering the controversial aspects of this provision, as reflected in an exceptionally abundant literature, aims mostly at identifying its “positives”. We believe that only a fairness-centred reading and an evidence-based analysis of Art. 17 and its national implementations can tell whether this legislative reform strikes a suitable balance between antagonistic interests. A literature review shows that, from a constitutional perspective, many European legal scholars tend to place copyright and the rights of authors at a level that is lower than that of other fundamental rights. Several scholars write as if internet users’ freedom of expression and the tech companies’ freedom to run their online businesses should systematically prevail over the authors’ expectation to enforce their rights and to receive fair remuneration for the exploitations of their work. Footnote 23 Despite the relevance of these remarks, this conclusion cannot be justified on the grounds of the European human rights framework if we consider that even the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), in several judgments, held that copyright, as a form of “property”, prevailed over other fundamental rights. Footnote 24 This conclusion is even clearer and stronger under EU law, considering the constitutionalisation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. As recently held by the ECJ on the grounds of the Charter, the complex provision of Art. 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive can be viewed as a proportionate and legitimate attempt to ensure a fair balance between the protection of users’ and online intermediaries’ interests, on the one hand, and creators’ rights on the other. Footnote 25 In the social media industry, the ECJ’s reasoning in Poland v. Parliament and Council emphasised that, although not inviolable and absolute, the right to intellectual property embodied in Art. 17(2) of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights is a human right whose high level of protection justifies the complex regulation embodied in Art. 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive and supports its adoption and EU-wide enforcement. Footnote 26 This opinion is perfectly consistent with the continental European approach to copyright and authors’ rights as personality rights and human rights that give rise to moral and economic prerogatives. Footnote 27

Currently, the implementation of a principle of “fair balance” based on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights clearly shows that (i) the protection of authors’ rights can prevail over other fundamental rights, and (ii) the resolution of disputes in this field, especially in online environments, requires the ECJ to engage in a case-by-case assessment of the various interests at stake. Footnote 28 Our research seeks to provide more than just a doctrinal analysis of the effective impact of the 2019 Copyright Directive in the European music sector. In doing so, we intend to embrace an evidence-based and neutral approach to Art. 17, which only a minority of European scholars seem to have pursued, at least in the literature available in English. Footnote 29 To fill this gap, we will involve stakeholders and experts in empirical investigations to ascertain whether platform obligations, on the one hand, and copyright exceptions and the remedies embodied in Art. 17 to protect media and artistic freedoms, on the other hand, are being effectively implemented across EU Member States. Moreover, to assess more objectively the impact of content filtering measures, we will scrutinise music licensing practices, the use of content-recognition technologies, and other forms of content moderation before and after the entry into force of Art. 17’s national transpositions. This is relevant, in our view, also to understand whether these practices are well-established policies of social media services even in jurisdictions where a provision like Art. 17 and a brand-new legal infrastructure such as the DSA do not exist.

An equally relevant research gap in legal scholarship exists regarding the interplay of Art. 17 with other principles, rights, and obligations embodied in Chapter 3 of the 2019 Copyright Directive. Our research project assumes that, without empirical investigations, it is impossible to assess the effects of these joint measures on the businesses of legacy music producers and new generations of music creators. As things stand, the above-mentioned legal principles of fairness, proportionate remuneration, and transparency are likely to remain empty promises without the development of a new, data-driven approach to creators’ rights. This approach can only be based on the availability of large volumes of data enabling music creators, their representatives, and online exploiters to negotiate and conclude licensing agreements in a smooth, nuanced, machine-readable, transparent, and thus fair manner. Footnote 30 Our research proposal assumes that, in data-analytics businesses like digital platforms, even subscription-based services that choose and curate their repertoires (negotiating and paying royalties to creators) cannot ensure fair and proportionate remuneration without using reliable, standardised, and unequivocal copyright ownership and management information coming from the music sector. Footnote 31 The research we advocate in this field goes beyond the state of the art by providing a cross-country empirical analysis of the impact of recent copyright and contract law provisions embodied in the 2019 Copyright Directive and, at an earlier stage, Directive 2014/26 on the collective management of copyright on the music industry, broadly defined. Footnote 32 Our research includes an evaluation of how EU competition law and EU regulations (including the DSA, DMA, and upcoming legislation such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act Footnote 33 and the EU Data Act Footnote 34 ) can apply and have an impact in the domain of online music platforms. This will allow us not only to produce evidence-based policy recommendations, but also to formulate a law-data-and-technology concept – built on the grounds of “co-creation” with stakeholders – to identify and rank solutions to the problem of information asymmetry across online platforms in Europe.

3.3 Economics and Business: Music Professionals and Value Networks

The music industry has been at the forefront of CCIs when it comes to the impact of technological advancements and related business model innovations. Currently, streaming platforms and social media are dominating the market, relying on their crucial position as intermediaries Footnote 35 and benefiting from winner-takes-all effects. Footnote 36 Their new business models, favouring access over ownership Footnote 37 and relying on the availability of vast amounts of (real-time) data, are accused of altering the value of content, particularly music. The music industry and its business models have constantly evolved with digitalisation and the growing domination of platforms. Footnote 38 Economists can contribute to interdisciplinary research by integrating the latest advancements in their analysis of value networks, of music professionals’ perspectives, and of innovative business models and by offering a longitudinal perspective on ecosystems, extensive surveys, and the use of quick-scan analysis to map large numbers of companies’ business models. Footnote 39 This will notably allow the integration of the role of “professionalising amateurs”, Footnote 40 a new category of content creators who act as YouTube, TikTok, or other social media’s partners, with growing economic and cultural relevance. After YouTube’s launch of its creator partnerships and programmatic advertising in 2006, these social media platforms started signing creators for the purpose of maximising value from their content and communities. More generally, the economic and business analysis of the music industry will consider the role played by data. A major disruption emerged from the availability of vast amounts of (real-time) data for music platforms. By translating data on user’s music consumption into relevant metrics, some authors argue, the business model of the industry was reshaped from music as a product to music as a service. Footnote 41 This is the case for services relying on advertising (content-sharing services like YouTube and Spotify’s free service) since data allow for the personalisation of advertising. This is, however, also the case with licensed services. For example, Spotify’s freemium model has been strongly supported by the platform’s focus on personalised content, which has been key in converting users to premium subscriptions. Footnote 42 Curated user-specific playlists are part of their product offering and perceived value. Footnote 43

The economic analysis we advocate addresses the notion of fairness notably in relation to value networks. While there is an increasing policy interest in ensuring that music streaming platforms are fair, there is a research gap regarding the industry’s and music professionals’ perspectives on fairness in the music platform market. Footnote 44 Since online platforms have become major enablers of music content flow, with unparalleled gatekeeping powers, Footnote 45 the remuneration of creators deeply depends on monetisation practices of platforms and on the ways through which algorithms expose information and cultural content. Footnote 46 However, to properly define this notion, there is an empirical gap regarding the industry’s and music professionals’ understandings of fairness in the music platform economy at both the European and national levels. Footnote 47 This task is even more complex if we consider that the impact of COVID-19 on culture and the performing arts has led to re-evaluations of the power of these platforms, paving the way for in-depth research into how industry representatives from the tech and music sectors conceptualise the fairness of music streaming platforms and social media. Footnote 48 The dramatic consequences of the recent pandemic for the performing arts encouraged several countries to start public inquiries into the power of global platforms, whose consequences are yet to be seen. Footnote 49

3.4 Computer Science: Influence of Algorithms on Music Consumption

Despite being presented as easing consumer choice, Footnote 50 platforms’ recommender algorithms are accused of lacking transparency, Footnote 51 threatening the exposure of content diversity and thereby challenging democracies Footnote 52 as well as violating consumers’ rights and citizens’ freedom of expression. Footnote 53 Algorithms have been accused of bias, Footnote 54 reinforcing discrimination in the real world, notably linked to race and gender, Footnote 55 and further increasing the popularity of superstars, blockbusters, and best-sellers at the expense of minority perspectives, local content, and emerging artists. Footnote 56 Our research project will highlight the effective influence of algorithms and aim to understand the way algorithms are being designed and implemented by different platforms. Footnote 57 Data are part of the algorithmic systems (especially recommender systems) that build this crucial personalisation process. Technological and economic developments have led to the availability of overwhelming quantities of digital content, notably music. Footnote 58 While some physical limitations have disappeared (for instance: space for storing, time for scheduling), others remain, notably users’ attention and what can be displayed to users (for instance: what a Spotify or YouTube user sees when connecting to the platform). Because of “overchoice”, Footnote 59 item selection can become cumbersome and complicated. Footnote 60 This makes it crucial, especially for media content providers, to incorporate algorithms that allow for a flexible and immediate response and adjustment to personal preferences of consumers. Such algorithms automatically filter, rank, and recommend content. Footnote 61 They influence the display or recommendation of content. Hence, algorithms are not neutral, and they raise questions as to how they are designed and implemented, who decides such matters, and on which basis. Beyond platform providers, all stakeholders in the music industry develop strategies and business models to cope with algorithms and adapt them to their own objectives.

Our research aims to produce new knowledge on the way platforms are affecting music diversity across the consortium members’ countries. In extending the work by Snickars and Mähler to detect and map patterns in algorithmic auditing by Spotify’s recommendation service, Footnote 62 we will account for a shortcoming of their work: access to data. Instead of using fictitious, stereotypical bots acting as users, we believe that this research would be more meaningful and fit for its purpose with the recruitment of a sufficiently broad and diverse number of real users (for instance: +1000). These users can donate their playlist data on the grounds of their right to access personal data collected and stored by streaming services and social media companies under Art. 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Footnote 63 Although the recruitment of users as personal data donors can be difficult, their involvement can be spurred by a data donation campaign across EU countries to fund symbolic or little monetary rewards, so that users have both a financial and an ethical motivation to participate.

User data are very useful for measuring the influence of algorithms on music consumption because patterns in personal playlists can be compared against one another and with curated playlists obtained from several radio broadcast channels in each of the countries where the investigation takes place. Moreover, in-depth qualitative interviews on music habits, perception of bias, diversity, and serendipity with 100 users can add a qualitative dimension to the interpretation of the playlist data. An important contribution here can be the development of fairness indicators for online platforms’ algorithmic systems based on the analysis of the data collected. To do this analysis, Fair MusE’s data scientists can rely on the use of Human-Num Footnote 64 and Dataiku, Footnote 65 a free software platform to analyse machine-learning algorithms, predictive models, and big data. Indeed, with the data and related statistics, this research can lead to an in-depth data analysis of the way platforms and their algorithms function and influence consumers. With that input, this new research can go further than previous research Footnote 66 by addressing the concept of fairness in a broader way through the development of indicators related to several dimensions.

4 Our Ethos

Disciplinary expertise is core to our work; its interdisciplinary deployment is what makes our research and its empirical investigations meaningful and promising. We believe that to address a multi-faceted concept such as fairness and to use it as an effective and desirable policy and legal instrument in the music sector, the approach shall necessarily be interdisciplinary. New criteria, methodologies, and tools are required.

4.1 The Concept of “Fairness” and Its Special Function in the CCIs

Recent developments in EU law and policymaking clearly show a strong and fast-growing policy interest in the notion of “fairness” in digital markets and ecosystems. Although this notion has various, conflicting facets, EU policy and legislative initiatives through which the European Commission is currently exploring the function of “fairness” clearly aim to promote awareness of how certain structural factors can radically reduce economic output and social welfare in several industries. Footnote 67 Especially in the CCIs, the principle of fairness is expected to reduce financial losses for content creators, whose work is significant not only in terms of economic growth but also in terms of the sustainability of Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity. Footnote 68 From this angle, the music sector is exceptionally relevant and complex considering its vastness as a cultural and commercial phenomenon and the fact that music is created and enjoyed everywhere, including low-income areas and communities where more expensive and complex types of creative works cannot be produced.

Our research seeks to shed light on the economic, cultural, societal, and technical context of EU music ecosystems, where a great variety of composers, performers, record labels, and platform artists target very different audiences in terms of size and geographical scope without knowing how the main digital music gatekeepers treat, promote, and commercially exploit their works. In this regard, the notion of fairness stands not only as a prerequisite for the pursuit of goals such as sustainability and competitiveness of an entire industry but also as a guarantee of consistency and compliance with the EU’s constitutional obligation to preserve and promote the cultural diversity of artistic productions. An important assumption of our research agenda is that EU lawmakers believe that a genuinely diverse music ecosystem can thrive only on the grounds of contractual and economic fairness. This presupposes much greater transparency in collective rights management, data collection, and proportionate remuneration of individual authors and performers. Yet these values, which have been recently embodied in EU legislative measures, are far from materialising in either market realities or in the day-to-day activities of music creators and their commercial and cultural partners.

4.2 Interdisciplinary Effort to Elaborate New Criteria, Methodologies and Tools

Our investigation entails considering a broad variety of online and offline environments where music professionals are involved, and assessing contemporary uncertainties around music’s economic and societal value and how they challenge creators’ opportunities to thrive and make a living. We believe that, notwithstanding the exceptional challenges that platformisation poses to a more transparent, competitive, and sustainable music sector in Europe, the current state of digitalisation holds the potential to help a great variety of music creators gain recognition beyond local or national borders and to overcome physical limitations. To investigate the impact of platforms on CCIs, a truly interdisciplinary team and approach are needed to connect media production, dissemination, and use on the one hand, and the legal conditions that are expected to achieve public policy goals on the other. Where our research seeks to innovate the most concerns tackling “fairness” from a conceptual perspective, considering it as a complex concept that requires interdisciplinarity and the analysis of several stakeholders’ perspectives and points of view. In a digital media economy where the largest gatekeepers are data-analytics businesses, appealing content such as music (in both audio and audiovisual formats) is used to attract and keep users active on the gatekeepers’ platforms for as long as possible.

Our approach to the notion of fairness from policy, legal, economic, and technical perspectives considers the various challenges raised by the advent and domination of platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, and, more recently, TikTok. Our research project is designed to unveil how today’s music industry can significantly improve and evolve in terms of transparency and access to relevant data. So far, the digital music sector has been dominated by trade secrecy, which has made it very difficult for policymakers to intervene by developing appropriate policy measures. Footnote 69 Our assumption is that greater transparency in the music sector and broader societal participation can help fight some phenomena that systematically penalise the majority of performing artists, music composers, and content producers. These phenomena include the implementation of unfair algorithmic systems and a race to the bottom that leads to the degradation of the commercial value of professionally created music and unfair remuneration. Our research also assumes that there is an exceptionally complex problem of data asymmetry across different stakeholders in the value chains, insofar as online platforms treat data about artists’ and content producers’ compensation and modes of content supply, exploitation, and consumption as a trade secret, claiming they need to protect data from industrial competition. The restricted access to data raises major issues in terms of accountability and of establishing a level playing field in the music sector. Lack of transparency also prevents the development of policy measures to promote fairness and diversity in a post-COVID-19 context.

In Fair MusE, we aim to investigate whether and how platforms have effectively enabled new forms of music production and home-made creations that empower amateur, early career, or disenfranchised categories of authors (“professionalising amateurs”) to gain online exposure, build and curate new audiences, and eventually become well-established music professionals. Footnote 70 At the same time, this type of analysis will enable the consortium to assess whether content platforms have induced a significant impoverishment of creators of niche or marginal repertoires that seem to be penalised by the logic and functioning of algorithms. Footnote 71

4.3 Our Agenda’s Major Obstacles

In designing our research project and building on the experience of the consortium partners, we have tried to identify potential challenges, the biggest of which is certainly the secrecy of the data our research is expected to collect and draw upon. Our project deals with issues that are very sensitive – commercially and technically – for major economic and political stakeholders at the European and global levels. We are aware of the difficulties this might raise, especially when liaising with the tech companies that own very large platforms and music services. For this reason, our research plan relies on multiple data collection sources and seeks to take advantage of duties of data disclosure that, under certain conditions, EU law imposes on data controllers and processors.

Another difficulty for research dealing with exceptionally large corporate interests such as those that exist in the music sector and, even more so, in the tech industry is that of developing normative recommendations on the EU policy and legal frameworks towards creators, business strategies, or large media environments while facing the risk of capture and lack of neutrality, which could weigh upon each research or communication initiative. Research that takes copyright and creators’ rights as one of its main pillars is subject to a lot of – not necessarily justified – criticism. We know that scientists cannot avoid being drawn into the controversies they are investigating. Footnote 72 In any case, while acknowledging that it can be difficult, especially for social scientists, to ensure neutrality and objectivity when investigating issues that touch upon their values, groups, and cultures, Footnote 73 our objective is to take a balanced approach that relies on critical thinking without ever transforming it into activism.

Another set of challenges comes from the strongly interdisciplinary nature of our research. Public research funding agencies promote and identify interdisciplinarity, but organisational constraints can restrict their capacity to fully embrace novel ways of interdisciplinary collaboration and investigation. Footnote 74 More generally, researchers from different disciplines and different countries work in different contexts, share different objectives, and may simply differ in terms of vocabulary used. Regarding the context, Friedman argues that institutional structures and funding patterns (among other things) make interdisciplinary research difficult. Footnote 75 One could simply add that researchers working in the social sciences in labs or under remote working arrangements (by necessity or by choice) have a totally different experience from their fellows working in biological labs. Moreover, different objectives can be illustrated by the fact that while there are “few more familiar aphorisms in the academic community than ‘publish or perish’”, Footnote 76 the length, the type of outlet (e.g. journal vs. conference proceedings or monographs), the usual number of authors, etc. can vary greatly from one discipline to another. As regards different vocabularies, they are at the core of our work on the multi-faceted notion of fairness. More generally, this challenge relates to the fact that sector-specific differences in methodologies can quickly emerge during interdisciplinary research efforts. Footnote 77 Rogers et al. even suggest that interdisciplinary research can be difficult to achieve due to incommensurable positions adopted by different disciplines. Footnote 78 Cultural differences – as one may find in large European research projects – may add to the difficulty to understand each other. Arguably, some of the interdisciplinary collaborations envisaged in Fair MusE are more common than others (for instance: between law and economics), but our mix is more peculiar. Finally, one challenge could be that interdisciplinary research potentially detracts from researchers’ expertise. While learning from others, researchers may end up spending less time developing their disciplinary expertise. This is largely because interdisciplinary research involves negotiating conflicts. Footnote 79 Sanz-Menéndez therefore finds that interdisciplinary research can lead to both specialisation and fragmentation, depending on the research area. Footnote 80

5 Putting Our Research Agenda into Practice

From a methodological perspective, we believe that a two-phase structure can allow us to pursue our research agenda and put our idea of integrating different disciplinary elements into practice.

5.1 Phase 1

Phase 1 (M1–M24, where “M” stands for “Month”) is designed essentially as a two-year mapping exercise in which four research hubs (which include industry partners) will split into two groups: (i) Law and Political Science, on the one hand, and (ii) Economics and Computer/Data Science on the other. The former focuses on the role of EU regulation, assessing the impact of new or recent policy or lawmaking initiatives targeting online platforms in the existing law and policy scenario (as detailed in Section 5.1.1 ). The latter analyses the complexities of music platforms from the perspectives of music professionals and their business models (see Section 5.1.2 ) and of consumers, where our computer scientists analyse the influence of algorithms on music diversity (Section 5.1.3 ).

5.1.1 Assessing the Role of Regulation

A. Analysis of the normative and policy framework

Our project explores, among others, the domain of music policy and lawmaking through an in-depth critical analysis of EU instruments, reports, and proposals. Footnote 81 The consortium will pay special attention to the 2019 Copyright Directive and to the overarching framework for the EU Commission’s actions in support of the European music sector: “Music Moves Europe”. Footnote 82 Both instruments are exceptionally important pillars of the EU music sector policy, seeking to address key concerns of this industry and professionals in terms of financial aid, intellectual property rights regulation and subsidies. Considering that fairness has been a key driver for rethinking the sector-specific objectives of EU policy initiatives, Footnote 83 it is crucial for our project to explore the role of policymaking over the past few decades and to understand the evolution of this field and how (and when) “fairness” became a priority.

B. Music creators’ rights under EU law

This part of our work focuses mainly on the rights and other prerogatives originating from the implementation of Directive 2001/29 (the so-called “Information Society” Directive), Footnote 84 the 2014 Collective Rights Management (CRM) Directive, and the 2019 Copyright Directive. We will investigate the practical implications of authors’ and performers’ rights for transparency, fair remuneration, and contractual adjustments (and, possibly, revocation) of their copyright transfers, as laid down in Chapter 3 of the 2019 Copyright Directive. This will be done by analysing the standard “Terms of Service” of each of the aforementioned platforms because they play an essential function from a copyright point of view, granting social media companies a free, global, perpetual, and non-exclusive licence which covers the original work each user-creator uploads. This analytical exercise will have long-term utility, as the DSA imposes more stringent obligations on VLOPs. Footnote 85

C. Copyright liability of social media platforms

This section focuses on the scope and implications of Art. 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive and of its national transpositions. Footnote 86 We will verify how social media companies seek to obtain licences for all works uploaded by their users and how they eventually restrict access to unauthorised works without infringing on users’ fundamental rights and freedoms. For this task, academics and experts from the consortium’s industry partners, authors’ collecting societies, and music right-holders’ representatives who are members of Fair MusE’s Advisory Board will cooperate closely. Footnote 87

D. Collective rights management in Europe

One of our research assumptions is that the global reach of social media and their multi-territorial distribution of music has been at odds with collective rights management, which has traditionally been fragmented from a territorial perspective, ultimately on the grounds of copyright’s territoriality. Footnote 88 Fair MusE aims to analyse the governance and licensing practices of EU collecting societies, especially for digital uses, as a result of the implementations of the CRM Directive. This analysis is essential to evaluate whether EU law has paved the way for an adequate music metadata infrastructure and the emergence of music data collection standards. Footnote 89 From a music licensing perspective, our main goal is that of ascertaining whether the EU has succeeded in reducing the very high transaction costs that, until the adoption of this directive in 2014, made fair remuneration of various music right-holders very difficult if not impossible. Footnote 90

E. EU competition law

We believe that traditional competition law remedies and the European Commission’s investigations in this field have a significant role to play in targeting potentially anticompetitive practices of dominant music platforms and social media. Footnote 91 This work includes a comparative analysis of the US and EU legal and music market scenarios. For several reasons, US federal antitrust law seems unfit (at least until recently) to remedy the extreme corporate power that the largest platform owners have acquired. Footnote 92 This situation sharply contrasts with that of the EU, where competition law has been widely used against tech companies’ abuses of their dominant position and where policymakers are trying to prevent these abuses through ex ante regulation.

F. Platform regulation and soft law instruments

Fair MusE’s team will consider the interplay between copyright-specific rules in the 2019 Copyright Directive and general obligations of digital platforms arising from regulations such as the DSA and the DMA. Considering that some of the largest online music platforms qualify, under the above-mentioned regulations, as “very large online platforms” and/or “gatekeepers”, we will map and evaluate how data access rights and protection mechanisms enshrined in these regulations impact on music right-holders’ effective participation and business on platforms. This work presupposes an analysis of automated decision-making procedures and music platforms’ content moderation policies, also to understand how many of these activities rely on standardisation, certification procedures, or human review. Our analysis includes soft law instruments, such as codes of conduct and best practices, which might prove essential to promote fairness towards music creators by enhancing data transparency and facilitating fair and proportionate remuneration.

5.1.2 Platforms, Business Models, and Professionals in the Music Industry

A. From value networks in the music industry to new music ecosystems

Our research project analyses evolutions in the music industry considering the implications of dematerialisation, of the dominance of platforms and their increasing reliance on algorithmic systems to filter and recommend content. To do so, based on a methodology applied in previous research, Footnote 93 we will map “value networks” and the inter-relations between actors. To this end, our researchers will identify: (i) the value chains and related activities; (ii) the different stages in the value chains that compose the value networks (including content creation, content production, distribution and placement, support environment, and support industries); (iii) the different actors (both generic names and actual examples of key players) in a process of stakeholder mapping. At the same time, our researchers will analyse relations between the different actors and possible schematic relations with other value networks, mapping inter-relations among, and multi-directional flows of value between, the actors and the process of value creation.

Our research will go beyond the deployment of a “value network” analysis by incorporating business perspectives that are targeted at platform-centred and platform-led networks and ecosystems. The added value of also applying “ecosystem” theories Footnote 94 consists in being able to address a wider range of factors (including regulation, music education, live performances, etc.) that determine how value is being created in the music industry.

The above-mentioned analysis will allow us to observe the impact of online music platforms beyond online streaming consumption. This impact is primarily in the online realm, between uses on different platforms (for instance: how the use of a track excerpt on TikTok can lead to an increase in this track’s exposure on streaming platforms), but also in the interactions between online and more traditional offline uses, such as the cross-effects between live performances and online consumption. Our analysis will finally address fairness from an economic perspective, especially in relation to the “value gap” debates, and more generally issues of creators’ remuneration, Footnote 95 in close connection with the project’s legal analysis (see Section 5.1.1 . supra ).

B. Conflictual and consensual aspects of fairness that digital industry and music professionals consider relevant for platforms

Our project will investigate what “fairness” actually is, not only for music professionals but also for the online platform providers themselves. At the European level, the focus will be on six key European associations: DIGITALEUROPE, DOT Europe, European live music association, European Music Council, European Composer and Songwriter Alliance, and IMPALA. Footnote 96 Data collection will draw on desk research (notably grey literature documents coming from the six associations) and will further be gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews.

At the Member State level, the goal is to explore (i) whether fairness is related to the remuneration of music composers and the rights for authors in relation to the use of their works by platforms, and (ii) whether fairness is perceived as connected with additional aspects, such as the role of online platforms in fostering cultural diversity, the creation of a level playing field for independent digital distribution platforms, etc. We will place special emphasis on the perception and use of algorithms (for instance: recommender systems) by authors and music professionals, seeking to explore how they understand algorithms’ influence and whether they adapt their works to fit the platforms’ expectations. Data collection will draw on an online panel survey involving participants from the digital industry and music associations in Fair MusE’s eight countries of investigation (Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, and Italy). Potential differences between Member States deriving from the size of the music market and their different systems of subsidies to the music sector will meaningfully enrich the analysis.

C. Online music platforms from a business model angle

Our analysis will finally map business models, combining research methods including desk research, expert interviews, and case studies. Our framework for mapping innovative business models will be based to a large extent on the Business Model Matrix Footnote 97 and the Business Model Canvas. Footnote 98 Based on the main types of actors identified previously, this work will produce a two-step business model analysis. First, based on a quick-scan analysis, Footnote 99 we will map all the main business model features of all the main types of stakeholders. It is expected that these main stakeholder categories are authors, distributors, and (playlist) curators. Second, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of at least six platforms with innovative models that are active in the EU. While online platforms have already been largely defined and researched, an in-depth analysis of online music platforms from a business model angle is still missing. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with selected organisations and companies to produce in-depth case studies.

5.1.3 Consumers, Platforms, and Music Diversity

A. In-depth assessment of the influence of algorithms on music consumption

Finally, Phase 1 of our research will include the consumer side of platforms, trying to analyse how these platforms and their algorithms impact consumers and, conversely, the strategies end-users may deploy to access, discover, and remain informed about music thanks to, or despite, platforms. This is also crucial for EU policymakers to effectively promote a fair and sustainable ecosystem. This work will help us make a synthesis of the various issues that have been encountered in research so far, especially as regards the practical effects of algorithms’ design (including recommender systems and playlists) on internet users.

B. Quantitative approach and data analysis

Our team will examine the effective influence of algorithms in the context of music recommender systems by using a quantitative approach and data analysis. We will rely on existing methods in the analysis of recommender systems, Footnote 100 extending Snickars and Mähler’s Footnote 101 analysis of algorithms beyond Spotify. Footnote 102 We will apply a broader and innovative approach to the collection of playlist data by replacing stereotypical fictitious users with +1000 real users who will donate their platform-derived data. Footnote 103 We will compare the +1000 anonymised playlists against each other and against playlists from 80 broadcast radio channels (i.e. ten from each of the eight EU countries within the consortium). This way we will be able to map playlist patterns; characterise diversity and bias in personalised playlists – which represents actual listening – with the curated playlists coming from broadcast radios. Qualitative in-depth interviews on music habits, perceptions of bias, Footnote 104 diversity, and serendipity with approximately 100 users (selected among those who donate their historical playlist data) will add a qualitative dimension to the interpretation of the playlist data. Interviews with broadcast editors responsible for playlists, curation, editorial profile, and rotation policies, and with representatives of online music platforms, will add an interpretative dimension to the analysis of broadcast music programming.

C. Fairness indicators

Finally, based on our previous work, our research team will produce fairness indicators in terms of platform transparency Footnote 105 and bias in recommender systems – as in Htun Footnote 106 and Mehrotra Footnote 107 – regarding algorithmic systems that are currently being used by the online platforms under scrutiny. By characterising the mechanics of the music recommender system algorithms as well the programming policies of many broadcast channels, our research team will highlight effective variables that indicate whether a given platform is fair and gives rise to a sustainable music business, while further suggesting a predictive model that can mitigate the adverse effects of these algorithms from a music diversity perspective.

5.2 Phase 2

In Phase 2 (M25–M36) we envisage the delivery of research outcomes to policymakers and stakeholders (Sections. 5.2.1 , 5.2.2 , and 5.2.3 ) alongside a comprehensive set of policy recommendations embedded in a White Paper on fairness in Europe’s music ecosystems (Section 5.2.4 ).

5.2.1 Music Copyright Infrastructure

In order to be fair, the increasingly platform-dominated music ecosystem needs to address the current lack of adequate data infrastructures through standardisation and sharing of content identifiers and music repertoire information, without which online music exploitations cannot be rewarded in a fair and proportionate way. To this end, we intend to develop a pilot named “Music Copyright Infrastructure”, the main goal of which is to help stakeholders target and solve the problem of information asymmetry across online platforms and right-holders – an asymmetry that is detrimental to all parties, including consumers interested in the diversity of music. We know that online music exploiters have turned data into their main asset (namely: massive, real-time data about their users, music consumption, and hence online music revenues). Considering prior efforts to solve these data asymmetries and their failures, due to participant concerns about the control of data and costs, we will provide a model agreement (and a set of guidelines) to help right-holders and licensees such as online platforms conclude music data-sharing agreements. In our view, these model agreements can help prioritise disclosure over enclosure (or secrecy) and can be directly tested by Fair MusE’s industry partners during the last year of project development.

5.2.2 Music Data Dashboard

The consortium will develop a demo of a Music Data Dashboard of statistical indicators for the European music sector to serve the information needs of policymakers, music professionals, and other stakeholders in this sector. This Dashboard will enable users to get a better understanding of evolutions related to the digitalisation and platformisation of the European music sectors by proposing or identifying indicators and data collection methods. Moreover, the Dashboard will incorporate a link to national statistical institutes, where appropriate. In short, we will (i) review current statistical sources of data on music at the EU and national levels, thus analysing statistical shortcomings in current sources, particularly regarding online music consumption and revenues; (ii) validate the data identified as well as the structure and the objectives of this tool during a “co-creation” policy workshop that involves policymakers; and, eventually; and (iii) deliver a demo for the Dashboard.

5.2.3 Fairness Score

The consortium partners will use the result of the business models analysis and of platform algorithms to set up a tool to assess music services and social media. A “Fairness Score” can become an effective tool to evaluate how online music platforms concretely deal with the criteria and goals EU policymakers intend to foster in the digital media environment. Each criterion, in its definition and assessment, will rely on the work performed in Phase 1 and will be reflected in the White Paper’s recommendations.

The Fairness Score will include the following indicative list of criteria: (i) governance in platform/social media; Footnote 108 (ii) market/non-market values; Footnote 109 (iii) local and national music in content online; Footnote 110 (iv) rights for creators, including access to data regarding their works and the exploitation thereof; Footnote 111 (v) fair and proportionate remuneration; Footnote 112 (vi) business model of the platform/social media; Footnote 113 (vii) gender equality; Footnote 114 (viii) small and medium-size producers vis-à-vis “superstars”; Footnote 115 and (ix) promotion of diversity in the algorithm. Footnote 116

Our Score will either be shaped as an industry-led solution or – on the grounds of data disclosure obligations that arise under EU law (cf. GDPR, DSA, DMA) Footnote 117 – as a soft-law policy instrument or a proper legislative instrument. We assume that this instrument could help EU policymakers influence platform/social media’s practices and conduct at various levels: legal (for instance, in terms of compliance with EU artists’ rights and copyright contract law); economic (for example, as regards fair and transparent remuneration); and social (promotion of cultural and gender diversity); and technical (algorithmic transparency).

5.2.4 Policy Recommendations: White Paper on Fairness in the Music Sector

Our policy recommendations will draw upon the above-mentioned research results, especially the in-depth analysis of new EU law measures aimed at promoting fairness and transparency towards music creators. On the grounds of an interdisciplinary analysis of the consequences of recent EU legislative measures, and of the related national transpositions, our Policy Recommendations will detail tools and actions to facilitate the exercise of creators’ rights through adequate data infrastructures. More precisely, we will include recommendations on the main objectives of Fair MusE: (i) whether and how today’s music industry can significantly improve and evolve in terms of transparency and fairness; (ii) whether and how, from both a legal and technological standpoint, the music sector can develop reliable, standardised, and unequivocal rights ownership information to be able to remunerate individual creators in a fair and proportionate way; and (iii) how legislative or industry-led solutions can reduce or minimise risks created by the enhanced dominance of the largest online music platforms.

6 Conclusion

In this manifesto , we advocate a new, interdisciplinary research approach that can remedy the shortcomings of a purely “silo-like” analysis of EU cultural and industrial policies in the music sector and of their effective impact in today’s platform- and algorithm-dominated economy. The music industry is an interesting case to apply this approach to, as it has gone through radical changes in the past two decades because of the extreme fragmentation of the rights, business interests, and artistic prerogatives that characterise the related creative communities. This has led to significant reforms of the legal and regulatory frameworks governing and shaping European music ecosystems, particularly those embodied in the 2019 Copyright Directive. This directive constitutes a “big bang” in the European history of copyright and artists’ rights, whose real effects are yet to be evaluated in a non-doctrinal and evidence-based way.

Approaching such changes, and in particular the multi-faceted concept of fairness, requires interdisciplinary expertise. This should include policy, legal, economic, and computer science perspectives. In Fair MusE, we analyse the EU as a policymaker in the music industry; we examine the legal framework regarding copyright, contract law, and platform liability; we study music professionals and how value networks have evolved; we assess how algorithms influence music consumption. We involve the music industry, notably via industry partners, members of our Advisory Board and other experts representing the tech and music industries, as well as the community of independent legal practitioners in several European countries. This does not go without challenges: overcoming data secrecy; dealing with opposing interests that govern strategic decisions in the music sector; and ensuring a harmonious collaboration between the diverse disciplines combined in Fair MusE. The last section describes briefly how we will do it, with a quick overview of the tasks and the main expected outcomes.

One point we are especially interested in is the EU’s policy responses. The 2019 Copyright Directive, with its provisions on the copyright liability of social media platforms (Art. 17), the fair and proportionate remuneration of authors and performers (Art. 18), and the codification of a right to transparency and access to data on the earnings generated by creative works (Art. 19), has an exceptional potential to strengthen the bargaining power of individual right-holders and their respective collecting societies in digital markets. The above-mentioned policy changes can become even more effective if we consider the entry into force of other instruments embodied in EU regulations, such as the DSA and the DMA, which are designed to significantly increase the level of responsiveness, internal risk assessment, and accountability of VLOPs and gatekeepers. This new array of EU law provisions targeted at the platform economy can certainly help address some of the existential questions raised by the largest online intermediaries’ ability to control consumers’ access to music repertoires and, at the same time, creators’ content distribution strategies and remuneration opportunities.

We argue that a proper evaluation of these recent developments in EU law should be supported by clear evidence. Such evidence can be built only through interdisciplinary efforts by independent researchers. We know that, to be effective and desirable as a policy instrument, the multi-faceted – and somehow open-ended – notion of “fairness” (used in key EU law provisions, and in many judgments of the ECJ in the copyright law sphere) needs to be dissected and analysed from a legal, policy, economic, and technological perspective, embracing a simultaneously balanced and multi-stakeholder viewpoint. That is the main reason why we promoted the creation of a consortium like Fair MusE, and why we intend to involve several categories of music professionals as well as representatives of industry and civil society in the co-creation of the project’s outcomes. Beyond the music-specific character of our interdisciplinary analysis, we are confident that our research results can also be very useful for other creative industries and media environments – including the news publishing sector – where data-driven exploitations and artificial intelligence have become pervasive and are inevitably changing the processes of content value creation and control and re-shaping ecosystems.

Change history

26 february 2024.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-024-01435-x

Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC [2022] OJ L277/1 (“DSA”). See Chapter 3, Section 5.

Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector and amending Directives (EU) 2019/1937 and (EU) 2020/1828 [2022] OJ L265/1 (“DMA”): see Art. 2 and Art. 3.

Promoting Fairness of the Music Ecosystem in a Platform-Dominated and Post-Pandemic Europe (“Fair MusE”), Grant agreement ID: 101095088, https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101095088 , accessed on 2 November 2023.

The academic members of the consortium are: Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB); Aalborg Universitet (AAU); Université de Lille (ULILLE); Université de Liège (ULIEGE); Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP); Tartu Ülikool (UTARTU); Central European University Gmbh (CEU).

https://www.siae.it .

https://www.verifi.media .

The European Commission’s recent legislative initiatives in the areas of standard essential patents, artificial intelligence, platform-to-business trading practices, as well as competition law all rely on fairness as one of their objectives, namely: Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on standard essential patents and amending Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 [2023] COM(2023) 232 final; Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence and amending certain Union legislative acts [2021] COM/2021/206 final (“Draft Artificial Intelligence Act”); Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services [2019] OJ L186/57 (“Platform-to-Business Regulation”). Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 ( supra note 2).

Statistics evidenced a dramatic fall of the music business between 1999 and 2014, when global revenues from physical and digital music sales declined by 42%, from $25.2 to 14.6 billion. See IFPI, “Global Music Report 2018: Annual State of the Industry” https://www.ifpi.org/ifpi-global-music-report-2018/ , accessed 2 November 2023.

“Value gap” is an expression used for the first time by representatives of the music industry in Brussels to describe the impoverishment of their sector as a consequence of widely uncompensated uses of copyright works across online platforms and a sharp difference between the licensing fees paid by social media and the fees paid by music streaming services: see , for instance, Smith, Desbrosses and Moore ( 2016 ).

Cunningham and Craig ( 2019 ), pp. 11–14.

Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC [2019] OJ L130/92 (“2019 Copyright Directive”).

2019 Copyright Directive, Art. 17.

2019 Copyright Directive, Art. 18.

2019 Copyright Directive, Art. 19.

Wikström ( 2020 ), p. 367.

Laing ( 1999 ), p. 31; Sarikakis ( 2007 ); Littoz-Monnet ( 2007 ); Iosifidis ( 2011 ); Donders et al. ( 2014 ).

See European Commission, “Music Moves Europe”: https://culture.ec.europa.eu/cultural-and-creative-sectors/music/music-moves-europe , accessed 2 November 2023.

The complex infrastructure of the DSA is designed not to interfere, but rather to be complementary with the copyright-specific mechanism of Art. 17: see on this topic, Quintais and Schwemer ( 2022 ), p. 191; Rosati ( 2021 ).

Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market [2000] OJ L178/1 (“e-Commerce Directive”).

A non-exhaustive list of these initiatives includes the following ones: Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon et al (40 academics), Open Letter to the European Commission – On the Importance of Preserving the Consistency and Integrity of the EU Acquis Relating to Content Monitoring within the Information Society, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2850483 , accessed on 2 November 2023; European Copyright Society, “General Opinion on the EU Copyright Reform Package”, 2017, available at https://europeancopyrightsocietydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/ecs-opinion-on-eu-copyright-reform-def.pdf , accessed on 2 November 2023; Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (2017), Position Statement on the Proposed Modernization of European Copyright Rules: Art. 13, available at: https://www.ip.mpg.de/fileadmin/ipmpg/content/stellungnahmen/MPI_Position_Statement_PART_G_incl_Annex-2017_03_01.pdf , accessed on 2 November 2023. See also Cory Doctorow, “Four million Europeans’ signatures opposing Article 13 have been delivered to the European Parliament” (EFF, 10 December 2018) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/four-million-europeans-signatures-opposing-article-13-have-been-delivered-european , accessed on 2 November 2023. Among the academic contributions following the adoption of the directive, see Dusollier ( 2020 ), p. 979, who describes Art. 17 as a “monster provision” considering its size and “hazardousness”. At an earlier stage, very critical scholars included Frosio ( 2017 ), p. 565; and Senftleben et al. ( 2018 ).

Rosati ( 2022 ), p. 397.

Although this initiative was consistent with Poland’s dissenting vote at the time the EU Council adopted Directive 2019/790, this case suddenly transformed the Polish government, a notorious antagonist (at least until very recently) of EU institutions vis-à-vis the affirmation of human rights and the rule of law, into a noble and tireless paladin of freedom of expression: see C-401/19 Poland v. Parliament and Council , ECLI:EU:C:2022:297. It is worth recalling that the Polish rule-of-law crisis culminated in infringement proceedings launched by the European Commission against Poland, alleging a failure to fulfil its obligations under Art. 19(1)(2) of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU) and Art. 47 of the Charter of the Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In the subsequent appeal, the ECJ ruled that Poland indeed infringed the principle of judicial independence under Art. 19(1)(2) TEU when lowering the retirement age of Supreme Court judges: see case C-619/18 European Commission v. Republic of Poland , ECLI:EU:C:2019:531.

A good example of scholars’ focus on the importance of safeguarding users’ freedom of expression and information in the online environment when implementing Art. 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive is provided by Quintais et al. ( 2019 ), pp. 277–282. In a similar way, Geiger and Jütte claim that Art. 17 fails to properly address the need to strike a fair balance between competing interests, emphasising the negative effect of filtering mechanisms on users’ fundamental rights: see Geiger and Jütte ( 2021 ), pp. 532–534. Other contributions emphasise how Art. 17 can negatively impact on the platforms’ freedom to conduct business: see , for instance, Reda et al. ( 2020 ), at pp. 42–49, claiming that the provisions of Art. 17 are not capable of achieving a fair balance between the fundamental right to conduct a business and other rights, as they place a significant economic burden on online content-sharing service providers. See also Geiger and Jütte, mentioned above, p. 542, maintaining that Art. 17 imposes immense obligations on social media platforms, restricting their freedom to conduct a business.

Among the most recent judgments, see , for instance, ECtHR Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (The Pirate Bay) v. Sweden , 40397/12, where the Court stressed that intellectual property – more specifically the “rights of the copyright-holders” – is a form of “property” that benefits from the protection afforded by Art. 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the ECHR against unauthorised dissemination of protected works through file-sharing technologies. At an earlier stage, ECtHR Case Ashby Donald et autres v. France , 36769/08 founded the protection of the copyright of fashion houses in their own creations (against unauthorised photographers invoking their right to freedom of expression) again on the grounds of the constitutional protection of “property” under Art. 1 of Protocol No. 1 of the ECHR. For a detailed review of the ECtHR case law on intellectual property rights, see Geiger and Izyumenko ( 2018 ), p. 9.

In C-401/19 Poland v. Parliament and Council , the ECJ provides an analysis of the principle of proportionality under paras. 63–69 and explicitly states, in para. 82, that “in the context of the review of proportionality referred to in Article 52(1) of the Charter, it must be noted, first of all, that the limitation on the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and information of users of online content-sharing services, referred to in paragraph 69 above, meets the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others within the meaning of Article 52(1) of the Charter, that is, in this case, the need to protect intellectual property guaranteed in Article 17(2) of the Charter.”

See C-401/19 Poland v. Parliament and Council , paras. 92–99.

See Strowel ( 2020 ), pp. 40–46, who emphasises how the constant, explicit reference to intellectual property as a fundamental right in the case law of the ECJ has played a central role in strengthening the protection and enforcement of copyright, especially in digital settings. As argued by this author, this explicit recognition under EU law provides an even stronger foundation for the qualification of authors’ rights as human rights. This is consistent with Art. 27(2) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the international level, which protects the moral and material interests of authors resulting from their scientific, literary, or artistic productions. It is worth recalling that while the concept of authors’ rights as moral rights is eminently European, it is gaining traction because of technological challenges even in systems – like the United States – that have historically neglected this concept: see , for instance, Sundara Rajan ( 2019 ), pp. 257–258.

As stressed by Strowel ( 2020 ), pp. 40–52, the recent case law of the ECJ reveals a careful approach in the examination of copyright disputes in the digital environment. The author stresses how, in several cases, the principle of fair balance made copyright claims prevail over defences based on freedom of expression and other fundamental rights (such as the right to privacy) because of the necessity to guarantee a high level of protection to intellectual property rights, as embodied in the EU legislation and as requested under Art. 17(2) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. See , for instance: C-275/06 Promusicae v. Telefonica , ECLI:EU:C:2008:54; C-160/15 GS Media v. Sanoma et al. , ECLI:EU:C:2016:644; Case C-161/17 Land Nordrhein-Westfalen v. Dirk Renckoff , ECLI: EU:C:2018:634; C-476/17 Pelham GmbH and Others v. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben , ECLI:EU:C: 2019:624.

For a more positive view on Art. 17’s impact on fundamental rights, see , for instance, Cabay ( 2020 ).

Mazziotti ( 2021 ).

The fact that prior attempts to improve rights information through standard tools such as the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) have largely failed can help solve a data-sharing dilemma that has only grown worse with the exponential increase in the availability of content on access-based platforms. On the failure of the GRD see , for instance, Milosic ( 2015 ).

Directive 2014/26/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 2014 on collective management of copyright and related rights and multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online use in the internal market [2014] OJ L84/72 (“CRM Directive”).

Draft Artificial Intelligence Act ( supra note 7).

Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data [2022] COM(2022) 68 final (“Draft Data Act”).

Rochet and Tirole ( 2002 ), p. 549; Poell et al. ( 2019 ), p. 1; Evans et al. ( 2005 ), p. 189.

Rochet and Tirole ( 2006 ), p. 645.

Luck ( 2016 ), p. 46.

Poell et al. ( 2019 ); Vlassis et al. ( 2020 ).

Van Audenhove et al. ( 2016 ).

Croll ( 2015 ).

Kastrenakes ( 2019 ).

Iqbal ( 2023 ).

Ferraro et al. ( 2021 ).

Vlassis et al. ( 2020 ).

Mazziotti ( 2020 ), p. 1027.

Flew and Gillett ( 2021 ), p. 231.

Castells et al. ( 2015 ).

Zarsky ( 2016 ), p. 118.

Bozdag and Van Den Hoven ( 2015 ), p. 249.

Helberger ( 2012 ), p. 65.

Bozdag ( 2013 ), p. 209.

Noble ( 2018 ).

Nechushtai and Lewis ( 2019 ), p. 298.

Chen et al. ( 2020 ).

Masnick and Ho ( 2014 ).

Gourville and Soman ( 2005 ), p. 382.

Kunaver and Požrl ( 2017 ), p. 154.

Haim et al. ( 2018 ), p. 330.

Snickars ( 2017 ), p. 184; Snickars and Mähler ( 2018 ).

Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC [2016] OJ L119/1 (“GDPR”).

Human-Num is a French infrastructure that aims at supporting research communities by providing services, assessments, and tools for digital research data. See https://www.huma-num.fr/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

See https://github.com/dataiku , accessed on 2 November 2023.

Melchiorre et al. ( 2021 ) p. 1.

See various legislative initiatives of the European Commission, cited above ( supra note 7).

See the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), Art. 167, para. 4.

Johansson et al. ( 2018 ), p. 165.

Mazziotti ( 2021 ), pp. 214–215.

Scott et al. ( 1990 ), pp. 474–494.

D’Agostino ( 1995 ), pp. 396–405.

König and Gorman ( 2017 ).

Friedman ( 2013 ).

De Rond and Miller ( 2005 ), p. 321.

Lach ( 2014 ), pp. 88–93.

Rogers et al. ( 2005 ).

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Sanz-Menéndez et al. ( 2001 ), pp. 47–58.

Relevant instruments and reports include: Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (2000) OJ L178/1 (“e-Commerce Directive”); Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (2001) OJ L167/10; Regulatory framework for electronic communications and services (2003); Commission, “A Digital Agenda for Europe” (Communication) COM (2010) 245 final; Commission, “A Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe” (Communication) COM (2015) 0192 final; Commission, “The AB Music Working Group Report” (2016) Publications Office of the European Union https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/f5479d95-2fca-11e7-9412-01aa75ed71a1 , accessed on 2 November 2023; Commission, “New European Agenda for Culture” (Communication) COM (2018) 267 final; Commission, “Proposal for a Regulation establishing the New Creative Europe programme” COM (2018) 366 final; Council Conclusions on the Work Plan for Culture 2019-2022 [2018] OJ C460/12; Commission, “Music Moves Europe – First Dialogue Meeting-Report” (2019) https://culture.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/library/mme-conference-report-web.pdf , accessed on 2 November 2023; 2019 Copyright Directive; Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector (Digital Markets Act) COM (2020) 842 final; Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC COM (2020) 825 final; Commission, ‘Report from the Conference ‘Diversity and Competitiveness of the European Music Sector’ with EU Member States Experts” (2021) https://culture.ec.europa.eu/document/report-conference-diversity-and-competitiveness-european-music-sector-eu-member-states-experts , accessed on 2 November 2023.

Commission, “Music Moves Europe – First Dialogue Meeting-Report” (2019) https://culture.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/library/mme-conference-report-web.pdf , accessed on 2 November 2023.

See various legislative initiatives of the European Commission, cited above ( supra note7).

Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society [2001] OJ L167/10 (“Information Society Directive”).

Arts. 33–43 DSA.

On this front, our analysis will be comparative in nature. Namely, it will compare the copyright treatment of user-generated content platforms under EU and US law, in particular the case law based upon the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) 1998, which amended the US Copyright Act (17 US Code), Section 512(c).

For the full list of the Advisory Board’s members, see the Fair Muse’s website at https://fairmuse.eu/team/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

Cunningham and Craig ( 2019 ), p. 15, where the authors emphasise that social media entertainment has, from the beginning, a global dimension because its content is not primarily based on intellectual property’s territorial control (as it is, instead, in the film and TV broadcasting sectors); Mazziotti ( 2021 ).

CRM Directive ( supra note 32).

Ranaivoson et al. ( 2013 ), p. 665.

The project also aims to consider the recent actions of the French, German, and Italian competition authorities, which have been particularly active in enforcing competition rules against large online platforms. See , for instance, as regards the French Competition Authority: Decision 21-D-11 of June 07, 2021, against Google regarding practices implemented in the online advertising sector; Decision 22-D-12 of June 16, 2022, against Meta regarding practices implemented in the online advertising sector. As regards the German Competition Authority, see Decision B6-22/16 of 6 February 2019 against Facebook for data handling practices; Decision V-43/20 of 21 December 2022 against Google for data handling practices in the case of Google News Showcases. In Italy, see the proceedings launched in April 2023 by the Italian Competition Authority against Meta for abuse of economic dependence towards SIAE, available at https://www.agcm.it/dotcmsdoc/allegati-news/A559%20avvio%20e%20caut.pdf , accessed on 2 November 2023.

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Negus ( 2019 ), p. 367.

DIGITALEUROPE is an organisation that represents the digital technology sector in Europe. See https://www.digitaleurope.org/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

DOT Europe is an association of the main internet companies active in Europe, including leading social media and streaming platforms. See https://doteurope.eu/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

European live music association is a non-profit organisation that supports the European live music industries. See https://www.elmnet.org/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

European Music Council is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to develop and promote music of all genres and types. See https://www.emc-imc.org/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA) focuses on protecting and advancing the rights of composers and songwriters. See https://composeralliance.org/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

IMPALA is the European organisation for independent music companies and national associations. See https://www.impalamusic.org/ , accessed on 2 November 2023.

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Based on the research conducted by the politics research hub of Fair MusE, as elaborated in Section 3.1 .

See the discussion in Section 3.1 above.

See an overview of the relevant issues in Section 4.2 above.

From both legal and economic perspectives, as elaborated in Sections 5.1.1 B, E, F and 5.1.2 A.

See Section 5.1.2 above.

As laid down in the Fair MusE’s Gender Action Plan.

See the discussion in Section 4.2 concerning the impact of algorithms on the discoverability of niche or marginal repertoires.

See Section 5.1.3 above.

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Mazziotti, G., Ranaivoson, H. Can Online Music Platforms Be Fair? An Interdisciplinary Research Manifesto. IIC 55 , 249–279 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-023-01420-w

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