Europe’s independent music sector is losing ground to non-European corporations, and without regulatory intervention on ownership, infrastructure and market access, cultural diversity will erode. That’s the warning in a new report from IMPALA addressed to European policymakers and the wider music industry.
The report follows on from IMPALA’s call last month to “stand up for culture”, which frames questions of ownership, infrastructure and market access as matters of sovereignty and democracy, not just commerce. Helen Smith, IMPALA’s Executive Chair, says the new report sets out “not only why that is an economic, cultural and democratic necessity, but how it can be achieved in a way that benefits the whole market and Europe as a world leader”.
Gee Davy, CEO of UK trade body AIM, adds, “With award season starting last weekend at the Grammys, this report is a good jumping off point for reflection across the whole sector. Big or small, artist or label, publisher or author or manager, this is an opportunity to unite around a strategic plan which supports emerging, diverse and niche music. This is vital to ensuring a future filled with incredible music”.
The report arrives as governments across Europe actively seek to reduce reliance on US technology providers. French civil servants are being moved off Zoom and Teams onto domestic alternatives, Austrian military personnel have switched to open-source office software, and German states are migrating away from Microsoft. The Donald Trump administration’s posturing over Greenland and the spectre of American tech companies being compelled to cut off access have concentrated minds.
Music, IMPALA argues, faces an analogous problem. Despite Europe’s position as a source of diverse repertoire and talent, most of the power in its music ecosystem sits with non-European businesses.
The report takes aim at major-owned companies describing themselves as “independent” without disclosing ownership structures - something IMPALA calls “cultural and commercial appropriation” that undermines both trust and regulatory clarity.
The report doesn’t point the finger explicitly, but Universal Music’s positioning of its Downtown acquisition as a “Virgin Music Group” deal - because the plan is for the major’s Virgin-branded label services division to absorb the Downtown businesses - is a case in point; the major describes Virgin as its “global independent music division” despite it being a wholly-owned subsidiary.
That framing is sharpened by Universal’s ongoing consideration of a US stock market listing, pushed by prominent UMG investor Bill Ackman of Pershing Square - a vocal Trump supporter who has hyped up America’s wannabe king as “the most pro-business president we’ve ever had”.
Universal is currently listed on Euronext Amsterdam; a shift to New York would move the world’s largest music company’s centre of gravity further from Europe at precisely the moment policymakers are asking who controls the continent’s cultural infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Universal’s acquisition of Downtown Music looks likely to proceed, albeit with the sale of royalties platform Curve to satisfy EU regulators. That still leaves FUGA - a significant European indie distribution company - falling under the control of an increasingly US-focused major.
The report doesn’t name the deal, but its emphasis on “guaranteeing independent European infrastructure” reads as a response to exactly this kind of consolidation.
The broader context is a shift in how culture reaches people. Twenty years ago, most people’s exposure to music was filtered through national or regional media - broadcast radio, local television, newspapers. Now, global platforms deliver the same cultural reference points - music, film, TV, short form content - to phones and screens everywhere.
Memes go global in days - the “six seven” phenomenon, a nonsensical phrase from a Philadelphia rapper, was being yelled in classrooms from Texas to Stockholm within weeks, eventually being named Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word Of The Year. Cultural phenomena like Peppa Pig or Bluey saturate the world in a way that once only huge sports brands could.
Recently published BARB data shows that YouTube has overtaken the BBC on monthly audience reach in the UK - the first time the broadcaster has been supplanted on even a single metric, given its decades-long dominance in Britain. In the US, YouTube is the single largest streaming platform by TV viewership, with a 12% share - ahead of Netflix and Disney+.
In Germany, streaming has overtaken traditional television for the first time, with 93% of 16-29 year olds using YouTube. TikTok’s influence on what music breaks through is well documented; Aphex Twin currently has more monthly YouTube listeners than Taylor Swift, driven almost entirely by a 24-year-old piano track going viral on short-form video.
The risk, as IMPALA frames it, is homogenisation - culture becoming bland and beige, shaped by algorithmic convenience rather than local scenes and national repertoire.
IMPALA has long called for greater localisation of streaming services - its streaming reform plan explicitly asks platforms to ensure algorithm developments “don’t negatively affect diversity, local repertoire and opportunities for artist discovery”. Without such intervention, the default is that local musical talent gets subsumed by global artists with global marketing budgets.
That risk is compounded by questions over who controls these platforms. Just days after a group of mainly American investors approved by Trump took over TikTok’s US operations, users began reporting apparent censorship of content critical of the administration. California’s governor has launched an investigation. Creators who built careers on the platform are reconsidering their relationship with it.
The report’s central thesis is that independence and cultural diversity are functionally synonymous, and the conditions required for one are the conditions required for the other. Those conditions are under pressure from market concentration, financial asymmetry, algorithmic opacity, and what the report describes as the deliberate “co-opting” of independent identity by major-owned distribution businesses.
Six recommendations follow: expanded financing instruments for indie companies, protections for collective negotiation, digital platform governance reforms, the establishment of a European Music Observatory, and industry-led standards on what “independent” actually means.
These structural challenges are compounded by new pressures. Recent Deezer data indicates that 39% of new music uploaded to the platform is now fully AI-generated - over 60,000 tracks per day. Up to 85% of streams on AI-generated music were fraudulent in 2025, with the platform demonetising those streams to protect payments to human creators. Meanwhile a CISAC study projects that by 2028, 24% of music creator revenues could be at risk from AI competition.
For regions like Southeast Europe, the concentration the report describes is not abstract. It translates into persistent invisibility on major platforms and limited access to sustainable career pathways, despite active local ecosystems. Music Equality data cited in the report shows that, in 2025, just 0.6% of acts at major European showcase festivals came from the SEE region.
But the window is closing. Every acquisition that consolidates control, every algorithm that defaults to global over local, every piece of infrastructure that passes into non-European hands makes the next intervention harder.
The European Commission’s decision on Universal’s Downtown acquisition - due by 27 Feb - is an immediate test case. UMG has offered to divest Curve, the royalty platform that triggered the Commission’s competition concerns; IMPALA argues this misses the point, and that the broader threat to diversity and infrastructure remains.
If Brussels accepts the remedy and waves the deal through, it will be harder to argue that Europe takes cultural sovereignty seriously. If it blocks it, or demands more remedies from UMG, it signals that the rhetoric about strategic autonomy applies to music as much as semiconductors.
If Europe is serious about that, music cannot be treated as an afterthought while governments scramble to wean themselves off American cloud services. The infrastructure that determines what Europeans listen to matters as much as the infrastructure that stores their emails.
And here is the harder question: if a generation grows up with its cultural reference points dictated by US platforms and US content, will anyone even notice what has been lost?
When Swedish children shout “six seven” in playgrounds, they are not being propagandised in any deliberate sense - but they are being inculcated into a set of references, rhythms and values that have nothing to do with where they live. Do that for long enough, and the audience for European music doesn’t decline because it was suppressed. It declines because no one thinks to look for it.
Governments are starting to treat social media as a public health problem. Perhaps cultural homogenisation deserves the same scrutiny - not because globalisation is inherently bad, but because a diet of nothing but global content leaves local culture to atrophy. The major labels won’t change course without pressure. Nor will the platforms.
The question is whether Europe has the appetite to apply it - and whether it does so before a whole generation grows up not knowing what they are missing, and there’s nothing left to protect.
