Last year (2024) was an interesting year for independent music companies, and also for attempts to institutionalise independence in music. Most of us can walk along a low wall with no problem, but given the same surface and a few metres drop to the sides we freeze or panic. It seems to me that independent music is now, in 2025, walking the wall. Satire often resides in the nuance rather than the subject of a scene, and the story of independence in music really is the nuance. So, with full awareness of the risk of committing the fallacy of an irrelevant conclusion – ignoratio elenchi – I am going to pick out a few of the more fun things that happened during the year recently passed, and pretend that my collage has form, and relevance for the present and future of independent music.
Fiercely Independent…
In February 2024, Bella Union, an independent record label with deeply creative origins, declared a new dependence on Believe, a venture capital funded music distributor which a few years ago had listed on the Euronext stock exchange. The label’s justification was that its new feeding tube was ‘fiercely independent’.
“A modern, vibrant company with an incredible story and phenomenal growth, Believe are the queens of the digital age. Fiercely independent like us, we feel loved, and we will give it back in spades” said Bella Union’s founder. Capital markets had been taking a different view: ‘fiercely independent’ Believe’s [BLV] not so queenly share price had been below the IPO price for a long time, and its founder was trying to persuade some other financiers to buy the company.
The very next month, March 2024, saw the start of a melodrama that could have realigned a large chunk of the Euro/American music industry, as Warner announced it was making a bid to buy Believe, this self-appointed flag bearer of independence in music. Warner’s bid fizzled out, and some extraordinary backstairs financial shenanigans saw Believe’s founder eventually finagle the business out of its public listing and into some private equity portfolios. A company might say it is ‘independent AF’, but when its shares are held by the very same sort of entities as own chunks of the biggest music companies (one shareholder, TCV, also holds stakes in Bytedance, Facebook, and Spotify) we are entitled to ask, ‘independent from what?’
Independence 3 Ways
The music industry has always had a confused and difficult relationship with independence. It is at the same time a genre of music, an economic classification of owners of sound recordings, and an attitude (presumably only needing to be applied to those who have lost their economic independence). None of these attributions are really strong enough to stand up to scrutiny, but let’s anyway take them in reverse order, and see what if anything is wriggling on the microscope slide.
As an attitude ‘independence’ has been one of the social functions of music for many years. Wherever the boundaries lie, in politics, societal norms, identity, there you will find music articulating the alienation or defiance many people feel. For most of us, barring a handful of genuine iconoclasts, an independent attitude expressed through music is no more than a very safe kind of confrontation with the conservatism of daily life. Barring a few crusties, the vast Glastonbury crowds are back working or studying on Monday morning.
As a genre ‘indie’ falls in different places for each of us, making it almost a self-reflexive Rorschach test. I have an image in my mind of a delta; the multi-furcated flow of a river through channels deep and shallow, broad and narrow, pools, swamp, and brackish lagoons before the flows and seeps reach the great ocean of pop assimilation. Music consumed perhaps with a frown, or a gurn, rather than the bland smile of a less strenuous pastime. It’s hard to think of a single style of music that has escaped the dignity of an ‘indie’ variant. Indie disco? You got it!!
So how does independence fare in an analysis of the economics of music production and distribution? Some of the best comedy is delivered deadpan, the protagonist seemingly completely unaware of the exponential absurdity of the lines they are delivering. In the ‘quotes’ bit of the press release that announced UMG’s obfuscated acquisition of PIAS, one of Europe’s most embedded and systemically important independent music companies, Sir Lucien Grainge, UMG chairman and CEO, was given these words, worth quoting at length:
At UMG, we understand that a vibrant independent sector is essential to a thriving music ecosystem. After all, we are a company built by – and for – entrepreneurs and today serve as an accelerator for so many independent creative voices, which is why we are delighted to provide PIAS the support and resources to bolster their company as a fiercely independent force in music. [Note that formulaic ‘fiercely independent’ again – never placid, those indies, even when selling out to the majors.]
Obfuscation by Gaslight
It is for good reason that I call it this an obfuscated acquisition. Independent music trade associations contorted themselves to maintain the facade that PIAS had not been bought. One association head told me that UMG owning outright 49% of PIAS and holding a charge on all the assets as security for what was no doubt a convertible or un-repayable loan was ‘a JV like any other’. The incoming CEO of another trade association provided some additional context:
Q: So you can be considered an independent artist if you’re distributed by a major? “Absolutely. The proliferation of self-releasing artists who are their own label and create their own team has really exploded in the last five years. The importance is really the nature of the deal and the control that artists have over their output, ownership and creative vision. [Just] because you are going through the Warner Music or Universal Music systems, it doesn’t mean that you’re not necessarily independent anymore.”
In some ways this is an admirably inclusive position to take, for it is surely possible to become self-defeatingly reductive about independence, to the point where any interaction with the bigger and more globalised end of the music industry becomes an act of betrayal. But on the other hand, an indie trade association should be prepared to call bullshit on a position that calls its essential purpose into question.
The Dog That Did Not Bark
If trade associations see nothing to defend in structural independence, what’s left for the businesses and the music represented by them? In another obfuscated acquisition the laughably named Utopia Distribution Services was saved from insolvency by loans from Universal and Sony, to widespread relief. It had managed to create almost a monopolistic position in distribution of vinyl and CDs for independent record labels; that dependency presumably put its continuation at the whim of the business affairs departments at two major record companies. The distributed labels could only hope noblesse obliged, as another pillar of structural independence was knocked away.
The tail end of 2024 saw the announcement that the other 51% of PIAS would be changing hands, shortly after some of its distribution clients announced they would move their business to a new distribution entity with a mysteriously nebulous corporate existence. Perhaps, rather than heralding a new approach to shipping vinyl, this says something about the terms of Universal’s call option on those PIAS shares. The new entity seems to be operated by the same business that rescued Utopia, having previously been bought by it; Sherlock Holmes might say this was a case of the dog that did not bark.
Commoditised Independence
It would be fair to ask what iconoclasts and the structuralists really contribute; or whether independence is after all a commodity that can be produced by the normal application of capital in markets.
First, some sage advice to new record label founders from someone many revere as an icon of independence, Martin Mills: “Don’t do it for the money.” (cited from here). This might indeed be realistic, but surely a record label needs to show some existential awareness of the value it (hopefully) creates. Indeed, it’s arguable that a record label’s core job is to ‘do it for the money’. The artists and audiences can take care of much of the rest. But perhaps the sentiment was more a kind of commercial predestinarianism, where obvious wealth is taken as a sign of virtue rather than of nous and graft.
Whatever the intent, the outcome of a community of businesses unmotivated by money is likely to be underdeveloped product, and artist careers blighted by lack of investment. I say likely – it is possible that a benevolent government or philanthropist puts a few tenners in the hat, or tips the scales to lubricate the independent music industry as an engine of public goods. But even then markets and capital are likely to win. And Mills’s own company is a case study in capitalistic success on a small scale. A real beacon for ‘doing it for the money’ in the creative industries!
United We Fall
The tip of the tail end of 2024 delivered another update, this time from a company that claims to be “focused on powering independence across the music industry.” That company would be Downtown, which spent a few years buying smaller independent service providers having jettisoned a catalogue of music rights and given up being a publisher. And in December announced that it had agreed to be bought by PIAS acquirer Universal in the guise of Virgin Music Label & Artist Services, named after a once iconoclastic and independent music company acquired by EMI. Downtown’s own independence is not easy to locate; the part most significant to independent labels and artists seems to be owned by offshore trusts. Perhaps it will all come to light in a competition enquiry, which will surely want to know why the complainers have so little foresight that they chose to become dependent on a business whose existential need was to get bought by the biggest fish in the pond.
Circle the Wagons!
All this makes 2025 seem like a year if ever there was one to circle the wagons. A small record label always has been a tiny node in a web of relationships without which it could not operate. But the digital music market is mostly owned and run by the biggest companies on the planet, and the same huge companies mediate the audience relationship. Even the old physical world of gigs and vinyl is utterly tech dependent.
In such an environment the instincts that worked in the past might be counter-productive. Herding small labels into collective deals and onto VC funded platforms looks more like salmon farming than habitat and ecosystem conservation. In other words, the kind of mutually defensive collective action that independent companies instinctively embraced in the digital world has not secured independence. Instead it seems to have produced a giant conveyor belt of independent music copyrights and capabilities into the infinitely hungry consolidators and asset managers of the new music industry.
Yet independent labels are and will remain totally dependent on investment in the technology and services they need to connect to markets. Blighting the investment environment for this essential layer will precipitate a rapid cascade of consolidation that labels would be powerless to stop.
Independence in Q2, C21…
It’s intriguing that in 2024 Believe, a company founded by venture capital, owned part by private equity and part through a public listing, with a market capitalisation of €1.5b, could be thought ‘fiercely independent’. Reason says no, it is subservient to the logic and needs of the managers of capital. So this kind of independence must be a different kind. Not structural, more confectionary, perhaps. That’s a very different kind of commodity than that which could be produced by an independent capitalist like Martin Mills.
Because really that has to be what independence is about – a choice over one’s relationship to capital and the ownership of the mechanisms of value creation. Those mechanisms might be no longer artisanal but prove daily to be as efficient at a smaller and more personal scale as when operated by the committees whose care primarily is for extreme wealth. If independent labels were not such engines of value there would be little to no incentive for the consolidators, or ‘factory ships’ as we might call them, to package them up and sell them.
It remains to be seen if the competition authorities in the UK and EU are going to take the wailing and hand wringing seriously. Their first question might well be, ‘if you value independence so much, why did you not choose more securely independent routes to market, or negotiate change of control clauses in your contracts?’ They might also wonder whether spoiling the value of investment in critical technology and services is a smart response, when a pathological reluctance to pay a reasonable price for the risk taken and the talent deployed means that the only path to value for investors is to aggregate, lock in, and sell.