Industry / Power

The latest news on industry reports and news across music, art, and culture.

  • This is not a feature update. It is a shift in how visibility, influence, and culture itself are being organised. Instagram is redefining “friendship” through its new “friends” model, and it is not quietly tinkering at the edges with minor feature or UI changes. This is a structural shift that will change how visibility, influence, and…

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  • New data from the European Audiovisual Observatory offers a fairly unvarnished view of where cinema sits across Europe right now, and it does not support the idea of a clean post-pandemic recovery. Cinema admissions fell by 5.5% in 2025, declining from 843 million to 796 million. That drop tells its own story, but what sits…

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  • The Ivors have announced the nominations for 2026, with 61 songwriters and composers recognised across seven categories, celebrating music released in the UK in 2025. The awards take place on 21 May at Grosvenor House in London. The Ivors 2026 nominations are in. Peer-judged by songwriters and composers, this is still one of the only…

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  • A new UK Music report titled “Black Music Means Business” quantifies what has long been understood but rarely measured: Black music is not a category within the UK industry; it is the foundation of it. The data now makes that impossible to ignore. This report proves that Black music isn’t just a category—it accounts for…

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  • Across the global music industry, conversations about representation and equity have become impossible to ignore. Recently we explored these questions through a number of lenses, from Linda Coogan Byrne’s newly released book Why Not Her?, A Manifesto For Culture Change, which examines the dismal disparities across radio play and festival line-ups in the UK and…

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  • In recent years, few cultural initiatives have reshaped Ireland’s conversation around identity and belonging as clearly as Black and Irish. What began as three simple words shared online quickly grew into something much larger. At a time when conversations about race and representation were intensifying across the world, the phrase captured an experience many people…

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  • The Friday Dispatch

    February Signals: A Bigger Music Industry, and a More Exposed One By the time March arrived, February had already left a clear set of fingerprints across the music industry in the UK, Ireland and Europe. It was a month that celebrated scale, spectacle and global reach. It was also a month that quietly exposed the…

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  • Book Review History has a habit of sanding down its sharpest edges. Movements become moments. Radicals become footnotes. The people who did the organising, the drafting, the strategising get compressed into a paragraph, if they are remembered at all. In Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights, Keisha N. Blain refuses that…

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  • Book Review Invisible Women is the kind of book that shifts your perspective in small, permanent ways. After reading it, everyday systems start to look slightly different. You begin to notice assumptions that once felt neutral. Caroline Criado Perez builds her argument around a deceptively simple premise. Much of the modern world has been designed…

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