Why true independence in music has never been more important

The lead-up to the European Commission’s conditional approval of Universal Music Group’s $775 million acquisition of Downtown Music sparked a debate amongst industry leaders over access to commercially sensitive data and market share. Those concerns are legitimate. When the world’s largest music rightsholder wants to acquire another significant independent player, questions around scale, competition and concentration naturally follow.

Major labels have often sought market control, which can narrow the channels available for independents and, in turn, threaten diversity and innovation. But an increasingly outdated “major vs independent” framing no longer gives the whole picture.

It’s been 20 years since I founded IDOL. For much of that time, music was not considered an attractive investment. Unlicensed file-sharing, followed by media predictions of the imminent death of physical formats, damaged faith in the industry’s long-term profitability. All-you-can-eat streaming changed that, ushering in predictable revenues that triggered an influx of venture capital and private equity investment.

Since then, our business has become highly capitalized in almost every sector. The turn of the decade saw mammoth funds like Hipgnosis accumulating huge catalogs, with Blackstone committing billions of dollars for stakes in the publishing and masters of some of music’s biggest artists. External capital also extends beyond music ownership and into the systems and services that artists and labels depend on day to day, illustrated by investor-backed rights platforms such as Songtradr and analytics tools like Chartmetric.

This problem is arguably more concentrated in digital distribution, with, I believe, only a couple of distributors solely owned by their founders. Just last month, Insight Holdings Group – an investor linked to DistroKid – acquired Zebralution from GEMA.

Outside interest is something worth celebrating, but it also raises some difficult questions: what are the underlying objectives of these companies that artists and labels rely on, and are they any more “independent” than their major-owned counterparts?

Read the complete opinion piece on Music Business Worldwide published on February 26, 2026

Read Pascal Bittard’s opinion column about the user centric’s payment system.
Read Pascal Bittard’s reaction to the creation of Music Fights Fraud
Read Pascal Bittard’s opinion piece on generative AI
Read Pascal Bittard’s opinion piece on fake streams