Who Captures the Value of Performance? Copyright, Streaming and Synthetic Media through an Indian and Comparative Lens

Abstract

The global recorded-music market reached US$31.7 billion in 2025, with streaming supplying 69.6% of revenue, while performance-rights income reached US$2.9 billion. At the same time, one platform reported that fully AI-generated tracks exceeded half of daily uploads at peak, exposing a widening gap between the volume of cultural production and the legal visibility of human performance. This article examines who captures value when performances are recorded, streamed, communicated in public, licensed into audiovisual works or converted into synthetic voices. India provides a revealing case study because its Copyright Act recognises economic and moral rights for performers but leaves the relationship among consent, assignment, remuneration and collective administration uncertain. Indian venue-licensing litigation illustrates the transactional problem; recent voice-cloning orders illustrate the identity problem. Comparison with international treaties and the laws of the European Union, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, China, Japan and South Korea shows that fixation rights, equitable remuneration and digital-identity protection require different legal mechanisms. A second group of comparators, largely absent from Indian scholarship, shows how the audiovisual side of the problem has actually been solved in countries such as Spain, Chile, Colombia and Mexico confer remuneration claims on screen performers that are unwaivable, survive assignment and are payable by the exploiting user rather than the producer. That comparison exposes the least examined feature of Indian law — a proviso making performer status in a cinematograph film depend on acknowledgement in the credits, and a royalty entitlement that names no debtor, no rate and no triggering act. In fourteen years no Indian court has adjudicated a screen performer’s economic claim under section 38A. The article proposes a two-channel model i.e. exclusive consent for fixation, targeted replication and interactive exploitation; and a single non-waivable remuneration claim for defined secondary uses, extended to audiovisual exploitation. It supplements that model with one-stop licensing, auditable metadata, enforceable credit obligations and specific, time-bound digital-replica licences. The resulting framework is directed equally to legislators, platforms, producers, collective management organisations and performers