Well. This is awkward.
For the best part of fifteen years, Ed Sheeran has been about as difficult to avoid on Irish radio as rain in Galway. You could change station, drive through three counties, stop for petrol and come back to the car and there was every chance the man was still singing.
September 2026, however, appears to have produced something rather different. Irish radio seems to have said a giant feck off to the ‘apolitical’ singer who forgot he was apolitical when he previously supported Ukraine and Israel. Amazing how he can remember the words to 187,690 songs, slight exaggeration, that all sound exactly the same, yet apparently forget that speaking up for children being horrifically killed does not require you to be political. It requires empathy and a heart.
A new analysis from Why Not Her?, compiled by Linda Coogan Byrne and Irish singer-songwriter Áine Tyrrell using industry-standard Radiomonitor airplay data, has found a month-on-month collapse in Sheeran’s Irish radio exposure. Lord jesus, are we finally going to stop hearing him at every wedding and funeral across the country?
Across the stations examined, Sheeran received 2,082 plays during August, then from 1 to 28 September, that had fallen to just over 7.15 million impacts.
Allowing for the different number of days in each reporting period, his average daily plays fell 28.2 per cent, while his average daily audience impacts dropped by 40 per cent.
And some individual stations fell considerably harder.
Today FM recorded a 60.8 per cent decline in average daily Sheeran plays. LMFM was down 51.7 per cent, Classic Hits 47 per cent, Cork’s 96FM 46.2 per cent, RTÉ 2FM 42.4 per cent and Spin 103.8 42.2 per cent.
In technical industry terminology: Jaysus.
The timing is difficult to ignore.
On 4 September, Macklemore used his support slot on Sheeran’s US Loop Tour at MetLife Stadium to say “Free Palestine” and perform Hind’s Hall. Ten days later, promoter Messina Touring Group confirmed Macklemore had been removed from the remaining US dates after venues said they would not host shows with him on the bill. Sheeran subsequently said the promoter made that decision rather than him personally.
Then came the exodus and the pure roasting he got online. Some of my favs include Erin’s message to Ed.
Irish singer Aaron Rowe withdrew from the tour. So did Irish group Beoga, who had worked closely with Sheeran for years as his on off backing/support band. Finneas and Lukas Graham followed, with the artists explicitly raising concerns about the silencing of musicians speaking about Palestine.
And while all of that was unfolding internationally, something rather interesting was happening back home.
Irish radio was playing significantly less Ed Sheeran.
Nobody at Why Not Her? is claiming that a secret WhatsApp group of Irish programme directors convened at midnight and collectively decided to ban Shape of You. The data cannot tell us why an individual programmer scheduled or did not schedule a record.
What it can tell us is what actually happened. And the change is substantial enough to warrant attention.
Tyrrell knows better than most that speaking publicly about Palestine can carry consequences for musicians.
“I was screamed at, spat at, recorded every word at my shows, stalked online…” she says of her own experience of taking a public position.
Her contribution to the report goes considerably further than one artist or one tour. Tyrrell sees the past few weeks as evidence of something artists are frequently encouraged to forget: cultural industries only appear immovable until enough people collectively decide not to participate in the machinery.
She has spoken of seeing something hopeful in the artists who withdrew their labour, especially Irish musicians prepared to walk away from major international opportunities rather than remain involved under circumstances they felt compromised their principles.
There is an unmistakably Irish dimension to that response.
For Tyrrell, Ireland’s experience of colonialism, dispossession and cultural suppression inevitably shapes the way many Irish artists understand what they are witnessing elsewhere.
Whatever one’s politics, there is also a much broader music-industry question buried in this story.
Artists are constantly told that radio is standing on a even ground playing what the major labels ask them to play, playlists are whatever the people want to hear, promoters are booking in the best acts, venues are neutral and commercial decisions are just commercial decisions.
Horseshit. It’s all connected, and it’s a few very wealthy men behind it all. Eh hem, Mr Kraft being one of them.
That is where the Why Not Her? data becomes interesting. As Tyrrell has pointed out, without data these conversations can quickly become anecdotal. Everyone has a feeling that something has shifted, but nobody can demonstrate whether anything actually did.
The team in Why Not Her? can.
The remarkable thing about the data collected by Why Not Her? is that it puts numbers underneath a cultural change that otherwise might have disappeared into social-media arguments and yesterday’s headlines.
A 28.2 per cent reduction in average daily plays is not a tiny programming wobble.
A 40 per cent fall in average daily audience impacts is even harder to wave away.
And when stations including Today FM, RTÉ 2FM, Spin 103.8, Cork’s 96FM, Classic Hits and LMFM are all showing sizeable declines within the same month, it becomes a legitimate industry story whether anybody particularly enjoys the question it raises or not.
There are, of course, other variables. September schedules differ from August schedules. Songs move naturally through playlist rotations. New releases arrive. Programming changes. The September dataset is also provisional through 28 September.
Correlation is not proof of causation.
But neither is “probably nothing” a serious analysis of a 40 per cent collapse in audience exposure. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this entire saga is that nobody had to announce a boycott for the cultural temperature to change.
There was no grand Irish radio proclamation.
No dramatic memo.
No ceremonial removal of a ginger-haired cardboard cut-out from reception. The songs just started appearing less often. the bird song could be heard in the groves again.
Whether that proves to be a temporary September wobble or the beginning of something more significant will require further data. But for one month at least, the artist who has spent years being virtually welded to Irish radio playlists suddenly found considerably less room on them.
Irish radio may not have officially told Ed Sheeran to feck off.
The numbers, on the other hand, are doing a fairly convincing impression of it.
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