4 days in the past the European Fee permitted Common Music Group’s $775 million takeover of Downtown Music Holdings.
In case you distribute your music independently and also you haven’t heard about it but, you most likely ought to have. Downtown owns CD Child.
It owns Songtrust, which administers publishing rights for over 4 million creators. It owns FUGA, which powers wholesale distribution for impartial labels globally.
These platforms weren’t simply helpful to the impartial sector. They had been, in a significant structural sense, inbuilt opposition to what Common represents.
Now Common owns them.
Most impartial artists distributing by way of CD Child do not know the acquisition occurred.
For a lot of of them, the working assumption has at all times been that selecting CD Child meant selecting one thing outdoors the most important label system.
That assumption is now technically fallacious, even when nothing about their contract has modified at present.
The deal took over a yr to shut. Just one % of notified mergers in 2025 went to a Section II in-depth investigation.
In line with a report by Reuters, the European Fee granted conditional approval of the $775 million Common Music-Downtown deal on February 13, 2026, after Common agreed to divest the Curve royalty providers platform to handle competitors issues.
Common/Downtown was one in every of them. The Fee issued a proper Assertion of Objections.
Over 200 impartial music trade figures signed a letter urging regulators to dam the deal fully, together with individuals from Beggars Group, 4AD, Secretly Group and Sub Pop.
IMPALA, the commerce physique representing greater than 6,000 impartial labels throughout Europe, ran a sustained marketing campaign in opposition to it for months.
When the Fee lastly issued that Assertion of Objections in November it genuinely seemed, for a second, just like the deal may not survive.
It went by way of with one situation: Common has to dump Curve Royalty Methods, the accounting platform Downtown used to course of monetary information for lots of of labels, together with labels that compete straight with Common.
Fantastic. Affordable. However right here’s the place the logic begins to really feel selective. The Fee’s said concern about Curve was that Common would achieve entry to commercially delicate monetary information from rival corporations.
CD Child has years of knowledge on what impartial artists earn, which markets they carry out in, how releases development over time.
Songtrust is aware of the publishing revenue streams of 4 million creators throughout 145 international locations.
The Fee’s logic right here is that distribution information and monetary information are completely different classes, which technically they’re, however whether or not they stay meaningfully separate in follow inside an organization the dimensions of Common is the form of query regulators don’t actually ask as a result of they will’t, not with out speculating about inner industrial technique that hasn’t occurred but.
The Fee concluded the distribution market “remained aggressive sufficient” to permit this, and left it there.
IMPALA referred to as the end result a precedent-setting intervention that “nonetheless fell quick,” which is diplomatic language for: we fought tougher than anybody anticipated, moved the needle, and nonetheless misplaced the factor that issues.
All through the assessment, IMPALA and the Worldwide Impartial Community argued that regulators had been asking the fallacious query.
Their concern was not only one dataset on one platform. It was that the deal reconfigures the construction of the digital music ecosystem extra broadly, and that the strategic management Common beneficial properties over distribution, publishing administration and operational information compounds in ways in which slim market share calculations don’t seize.
What makes this tougher to swallow is how deliberate Common’s broader technique appears.
The corporate already controls roughly 42% of the recorded music market in the US, slightly below the 50% threshold at which the FTC would start treating an organization as a monopoly.
In Europe the edge drops to 40%, which is why Brussels seemed as exhausting because it did. Somewhat than hold shopping for catalogues and threat breaching these limits, Common has spent latest years shopping for the infrastructure that music passes by way of as a substitute.
It’s not the identical factor legally. The Orchard does this for Sony. Imagine does it for TuneCore’s guardian firm. Common was behind, and this acquisition closes that hole.
Common additionally sued TuneCore for $500 million mid-deal, alleging the platform allowed copyright-infringing music to be uploaded.
TuneCore’s guardian Imagine has positioned itself as a real various to main label infrastructure. You may determine what to make of the timing.
The Virgin Music Group press launch, issued on the day of approval, described the deal as creating “a extra highly effective, extra open ecosystem” for impartial artists.
The co-CEOs used the phrase “impartial” 4 instances. They didn’t point out CD Child’s pricing mannequin. They didn’t deal with Songtrust’s information.
They didn’t say whether or not the flat-fee construction that makes CD Child enticing to artists on the early phases of a profession would stay in place as soon as CD Child is a income line contained in the world’s largest music firm.
It’s genuinely too early to know whether or not Common will combine CD Child’s artist information into its broader industrial technique, or whether or not this acquisition is solely about capturing market share within the distribution layer.
My guess is the previous, ultimately, however the music trade is filled with acquisitions the place the client didn’t know what to do with what they purchased for the primary few years.
The priority isn’t that Common wakes up tomorrow and begins weaponising Songtrust information.
The priority is a slower drift, over years, in how the phrases work, which rights get prioritised, and whose pursuits the platform is finally optimised for.
The impartial sector doesn’t collapse due to this. DistroKid, Amuse, and others stay impartial.
The Fee’s view was that switching between service suppliers is easy sufficient to maintain competitors sincere. In follow it’s tougher than that.
Migrating a list from one distributor to a different includes preserving metadata, sustaining playlist positions, and managing a niche interval that may injury algorithmic visibility at precisely the second an artist can least afford it.
That friction is actual even when it doesn’t present up in a market share calculation. However the argument was by no means actually about monopoly thresholds anyway. It was about leverage.
Common now has a direct operational relationship with thousands and thousands of artists who distribute their music believing they’re working outdoors the most important label system.
Whether or not that relationship stays impartial is fully down as to if Common decides it ought to, and at a second when the royalty pool is already below stress from AI-generated content material flooding the identical platforms, the margin for error on phrases and payouts is thinner than it’s ever been.
The European Fee permitted the deal on February 13. Curve can be bought to an impartial purchaser but to be named. Every part else is Common’s.
The artists utilizing these platforms to remain impartial at the moment are, whether or not they realize it or not, working inside the infrastructure of the corporate they had been attempting to remain impartial from.
