Blog
Mar 18, 2021
[…]Universal told the Journal the E.U.’s approval “will benefit the artistic community and music industry” and that Universal is glad it will hold onto more than two-thirds of EMI’s global business. But IMPALA, a trade group representing European independent record labels, protested that the required sell-offs wouldn’t be enough to limit Universal’s increasing grip on the market. Casey Rae, deputy director of the U.S. nonprofit Future of Music Coalition, told Politico that “there’s not really going to be any number of divestitures that will make this a groovy deal.” Somewhere, someone at General Electric, the majority owner of Universal-owning (and now EMI-owning) Vivendi, a French media conglomerate, is chanting “swag.”