Independent record label exec Martin Mills \u2014 most famous for discovering Adele \u2014 previously told POLITICO that the merger could deal a fatal blow to the production of alternative music producers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it were not for the independents, there would be no hip hop, no punk, and no Elvis Presley,\u201d\u00a0said Mills.<\/p>\n
The Commission said it had reservations regarding the $775 million acquisition of a key provider of digital services for indie record labels.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“By acquiring Downtown, UMG would purchase a large provider of services for labels that compete with UMG and for artists,” said Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis. <\/p>\n
Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera recused herself from the review due to a conflict of interest arising from a family member working for one of the companies. <\/p>\n
The merger was not big enough to trigger an automatic review by the Commission. It was referred to the EU executive by competition authorities in the Netherlands and Austria following complaints from indie labels that it would give the the major commercial record label control over key production inputs.<\/p>\n
The Commission will investigate the transaction over the next 90 days and is expected to come to a conclusion by November 26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Independent record label exec Martin Mills \u2014 most famous for discovering Adele \u2014 previously told POLITICO that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[11032,3256,84,1341,59,1350,128,642,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-16823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-antitrust","tag-austria","tag-business","tag-competition","tag-gb","tag-mergers","tag-music","tag-the-netherlands","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}