Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Universal Music Group Expands Mental Health Push With Amber Health and Project Healthy Minds
Universal Music Group expands its mental health efforts with Amber Health and Project Healthy Minds, building on earlier wellness partnerships.
Universal Music Group is widening its mental health and wellbeing efforts with new partnerships alongside Amber Health and Project Healthy Minds, a move announced on May 13 that points to how the company is trying to build support structures around the people who actually keep the machine moving.
Through the new programs, UMG says it wants to improve access to care across its creative community, with a particular focus on artists, songwriters and employees. The company’s latest step arrives after years of stop-start industry conversation about burnout, isolation and the uneven support systems available to music workers, especially those operating far from the public-facing center of the business.
Under its partnership with Amber Health, UMG says its artists and songwriters in North America will get 24/7 access to mental health services that include clinical expertise, crisis response, care planning and specialized referrals. The company will also extend the work to employees in the United States and Canada, adding more behavioral health support and resources. The idea is less about a one-off benefit than something more embedded in the day-to-day infrastructure of the labels themselves.
UMG is also joining Project Healthy Minds as a founding member of its workforce mental health research initiative, becoming the first music company to sign on. The project is designed to build a standardized framework for measuring workforce mental health and its connection to organizational performance, with academic partners including Harvard Business School involved in establishing data-driven benchmarks and best practices that could travel beyond music.
“Through our strategic partnerships with organizations like Amber Health and Project Healthy Minds — and our continued investment in groundbreaking programs like Music Health Alliance’s Music Industry Mental Health Fund,” says Susan Mazo, UMG’s chief impact officer, “we are working to redesign how our industry supports wellbeing. Our focus is on expanding access to care, reducing stigma, and ensuring that our artists and songwriters, employees, and the broader music community have the resources they need to thrive.”
Amber Health’s co-founders, Dr. Chayim Newman and Zack Borer, framed the agreement as a more structural intervention than labels have typically offered. As they put it, the partnership represents “a real shift in how labels support their artists,” adding that UMG is helping embed rapid access to specialized mental health care “directly into the labels’ infrastructure, making it proactive rather than an afterthought.”
Adds Phil Schermer, founder and CEO, Project Healthy Minds: “Music has always been a vehicle for mental health conversations and now Universal Music Group is bringing that same honesty inside its own walls. When a company of UMG’s reach commits to this, the whole industry pays attention.”
The new partnerships build on a broader pattern of UMG trying to turn mental health language into something more operational. In February 2025, the company teamed with Nashville-based non-profit Music Health Alliance on the Music Industry Mental Health Fund, which offers comprehensive outpatient mental health resources for music industry professionals across the United States. That initiative followed the healthcare access program UMG and MHA launched in April 2021.
Last year, UMG and Apple Music also introduced Sound Therapy globally, a wellness collection meant to help listeners with clearer focus, deeper relaxation and better sleep. It sits in a different lane from the workforce programs, but it points in the same direction: a major label trying to make mental health part of its public-facing identity, not just an internal HR concern.
The industry context is hard to ignore. Touring schedules, isolation, irregular hours and the general pressure of working in music have long made creatives and the people around them vulnerable to mental health struggles. A 2019 study by Swedish digital distribution platform Record Union, published before the pandemic, found that more than 73 percent of independent music makers reported symptoms of mental illness. Separately, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Survey 2024 from Australian music charity Support Act found that 53.5% of Australian music and creative workers were experiencing high or very high psychological distress, while more than 68% pointed to the rising cost of living as a major issue.
UMG says it will continue working with existing partners, including Mental Health Coalition, to draw attention to resources and research-backed ways music can support mental health. The company’s latest announcements suggest an industry still learning how to respond to a problem it has spent years acknowledging but not always addressing with enough structure.
