CULTURE NEWS
Cultural news, data reports and industry updates across culture, arts, politics, music and the creative sectors.
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Yet most people haven’t noticed yet. For all the headlines and sensationalism surrounding artificial intelligence and music over the last two years, the real story has not been happening publicly at all.” It has been happening inside boardrooms, policy discussions, licensing negotiations and closed-door meetings between music companies, technology firms and rights holders attempting to…
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I have read over the World Happiness Report 2026 a few times now. Full disclosure, I am neurodivergent, and sometimes I need to read, re-read, and then put something down and come back to it so my brain can properly take in what the data is actually telling us. What is the story and the…
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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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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…
The Industry Review 