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Universal Just Bought the Infrastructure Independent Artists Depend On

CD Baby, Songtrust and FUGA now belong to UMG. What the EU approved on February 13 is less a record deal than a takeover of the pipes.
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Universal Just Bought the Infrastructure Independent Artists Depend On

Four days ago the European Commission approved Universal Music Group’s $775 million takeover of Downtown Music Holdings. 

If you distribute your music independently and you haven’t heard about it yet, you probably should have. Downtown owns CD Baby. 

It owns Songtrust, which administers publishing rights for over four million creators. It owns FUGA, which powers wholesale distribution for independent labels globally. 

These platforms weren’t just useful to the independent sector. They were, in a meaningful structural sense, built in opposition to what Universal represents.

Now Universal owns them.

Most independent artists distributing through CD Baby have no idea the acquisition happened. 

For many of them, the working assumption has always been that choosing CD Baby meant choosing something outside the major label system. 

That assumption is now technically wrong, even if nothing about their contract has changed today.

The deal took over a year to close. Only one percent of notified mergers in 2025 went to a Phase II in-depth investigation.

According to a report by Reuters, the European Commission granted conditional approval of the $775 million Universal Music-Downtown deal on February 13, 2026, after Universal agreed to divest the Curve royalty services platform to address competition concerns.

Universal/Downtown was one of them. The Commission issued a formal Statement of Objections. 

Over 200 independent music industry figures signed a letter urging regulators to block the deal entirely, including people from Beggars Group, 4AD, Secretly Group and Sub Pop. 

IMPALA, the trade body representing more than 6,000 independent labels across Europe, ran a sustained campaign against it for months. 

When the Commission finally issued that Statement of Objections in November it genuinely looked, for a moment, like the deal might not survive.

It went through with one condition: Universal has to sell off Curve Royalty Systems, the accounting platform Downtown used to process financial data for hundreds of labels, including labels that compete directly with Universal.

Fine. Reasonable. But here’s where the logic starts to feel selective. The Commission’s stated concern about Curve was that Universal would gain access to commercially sensitive financial data from rival companies. 

CD Baby has years of data on what independent artists earn, which markets they perform in, how releases trend over time. 

Songtrust knows the publishing income streams of four million creators across 145 countries. 

The Commission’s logic here is that distribution data and financial data are different categories, which technically they are, but whether they remain meaningfully separate in practice inside a company the size of Universal is the kind of question regulators don’t really ask because they can’t, not without speculating about internal commercial strategy that hasn’t happened yet. 

The Commission concluded the distribution market “remained competitive enough” to allow this, and left it there.

IMPALA called the outcome a precedent-setting intervention that “still fell short,” which is diplomatic language for: we fought harder than anyone expected, moved the needle, and still lost the thing that matters.

Throughout the review, IMPALA and the Worldwide Independent Network argued that regulators were asking the wrong question. 

Their concern was not just one dataset on one platform. It was that the deal reconfigures the structure of the digital music ecosystem more broadly, and that the strategic control Universal gains over distribution, publishing administration and operational data compounds in ways that narrow market share calculations don’t capture.

What makes this harder to swallow is how deliberate Universal’s broader strategy looks. 

The company already controls roughly 42% of the recorded music market in the United States, just under the 50% threshold at which the FTC would begin treating a company as a monopoly. 

In Europe the threshold drops to 40%, which is why Brussels looked as hard as it did. Rather than keep buying catalogues and risk breaching those limits, Universal has spent recent years buying the infrastructure that music passes through instead. 

It’s not the same thing legally. The Orchard does this for Sony. Believe does it for TuneCore’s parent company. Universal was behind, and this acquisition closes that gap.

Universal also sued TuneCore for $500 million mid-deal, alleging the platform allowed copyright-infringing music to be uploaded. 

TuneCore’s parent Believe has positioned itself as a genuine alternative to major label infrastructure. You can decide what to make of the timing.

The Virgin Music Group press release, issued on the day of approval, described the deal as creating “a more powerful, more open ecosystem” for independent artists. 

The co-CEOs used the word “independent” four times. They didn’t mention CD Baby’s pricing model. They didn’t address Songtrust’s data. 

They didn’t say whether the flat-fee structure that makes CD Baby attractive to artists at the early stages of a career would remain in place once CD Baby is a revenue line inside the world’s largest music company.

It’s genuinely too early to know whether Universal will integrate CD Baby’s artist data into its broader commercial strategy, or whether this acquisition is purely about capturing market share in the distribution layer. 

My guess is the former, eventually, but the music industry is full of acquisitions where the buyer didn’t know what to do with what they bought for the first few years. 

The concern isn’t that Universal wakes up tomorrow and starts weaponising Songtrust data. 

The concern is a slower drift, over years, in how the terms work, which rights get prioritised, and whose interests the platform is ultimately optimised for.

The independent sector doesn’t collapse because of this. DistroKid, Amuse, and others remain independent. 

The Commission’s view was that switching between service providers is straightforward enough to keep competition honest. In practice it’s harder than that. 

Migrating a catalogue from one distributor to another involves preserving metadata, maintaining playlist positions, and managing a gap period that can damage algorithmic visibility at exactly the moment an artist can least afford it. 

That friction is real even if it doesn’t show up in a market share calculation. But the argument was never really about monopoly thresholds anyway. It was about leverage. 

Universal now has a direct operational relationship with millions of artists who distribute their music believing they are working outside the major label system. 

Whether that relationship stays neutral is entirely down to whether Universal decides it should, and at a moment when the royalty pool is already under pressure from AI-generated content flooding the same platforms, the margin for error on terms and payouts is thinner than it’s ever been.

The European Commission approved the deal on February 13. Curve will be sold to an independent buyer yet to be named. Everything else is Universal’s. 

The artists using those platforms to stay independent are now, whether they know it or not, operating inside the infrastructure of the company they were trying to stay independent from.

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