CULTURE NEWS
Cultural news, data reports and industry updates across music and the creative sectors.
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Linda Coogan Byrne is a leading publicist, DEI strategist, and author. She also is the founder of Why Not Her?, a gender equity campaign aiming to challenge systemic bias in media and the music industry. In a new Frontiers in Communication article that presents an analysis of gender-based exclusion in the Irish and UK music industries between 2018 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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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…
The Industry Review 