Corpo buyouts and consolidations are starting to look like thee business "plan" for independent music. The people who make it, cover it, and support it keep getting squeezed. And the squeezing gets pitched to us as good news or swept under the rug.
On August 4, the staff of BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, appear to have been laid off. Pitchfork reports all emails to all staffers, "with the exception of founder Dave Levine, bounced back." BrooklynVegan launched in 2004. Alternative Press dates to 1985. Goldmine has served record collectors since the 1970s. All four had been rolled up under Veeps, the livestream-ticketing company owned by Live Nation. Stated simply: a giant ticketing platform bought some of the last outlets covering underground music, then gutted them.
That is not a media strategy. It's an asset stripped for parts.
A few weeks earlier, in Minneapolis, warehouse workers at Kings Road Merch voted to unionize. The vote was unanimous. Kings Road was founded by Epitaph's Brett Gurewitz. It prints and ships merch for Rancid, Descendents, Converge, Dropkick Murphys, and a lot more. Then Sony Music's distribution arm, the Orchard, acquired it. On the morning of the union's first bargaining session, Sony's lawyers announced plans to shutter the warehouse. Workers said they were shorted overtime. They folded Union Strong shirts for Dropkick Murphys while they had no union of their own. They called it what it looked like. Union-busting. As one worker put it, when Sony took over, they broke everything, and the workers kept the place running through the chaos.
In July, DistroKid sold a majority stake to CVC Capital Partners. DistroKid, by its own numbers, handles 30 to 40 percent of all new music released on earth. CVC is a private equity firm managing more than 200 billion euros. It was spun out of Citibank. The reported price ran around two billion dollars. CVC also backs Superstruct, the festival conglomerate that artists are boycotting right now. So the pipeline that millions of independent artists use to reach listeners now answers, in large part, to a fund's return targets.
Media, merch, distribution. Three pillars in the same ecosystem. Three different corporate parents. One identical move. Consolidate, extract, discard. Small operations that trade away their independence end up on the chopping block. The corporate reaper always comes to collect.
We are a worked-owned company.
No private equity fund owns a slice of us. No ticketing conglomerate has us penciled in as a line item. It's not a marketing angle. It's the whole point. When you don't answer to a boardroom that needs to double its money in five years, you can just build the thing artists need, and keep building it.
