Just two days earlier - as exclusively revealed on musicweek.com - the British Government unveiled its latest consultation to unburden live music from the bureaucracy and costs imposed by the Licensing Act.

These latest moves follow the Government's recent response to the Hargreaves Review of IP, which delivered a raft of packages relating to the Digital Economy Act and also backed a Digital Copyright Exchange.

But it was Monday's events in Brussels which saw the champagne cracked open, because for ...