Spending that money was part of their strategy to go for a "bundled" rate for royalties, which 99% (their number) of the US customer base now does. In a nutshell, they can downrate the royalties for music as long as they bundle other things with it- that's why there's books on there now as well. UMG is now fighting it [0] but all the indies are basically fucked as there's no global leverage.

The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.

[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...