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From boardrooms to grassroots activism, these are the women helping redefine power across the modern music business. When Billboard unveiled its 2026 U.K. Power Players list, much of the conversation naturally centred on superstar artists, billion-stream campaigns and record-breaking tours. But underneath the headlines sits a different story. One that is arguably far more important.…
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8/10 There is something quietly cinematic about “Darlin’”, the new release from Irish collective AINM, but not in the overly polished or self-conscious way that term often gets thrown around. Instead, the track feels expansive because it understands atmosphere. It understands restraint. It allows space to exist between the notes. Originally beginning life as a…
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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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Our Rating: 7/10 Bea Elmy Martin’s “Anouk” lands as a deeply personal study of friendship, but what gives it weight is how deliberately it has been allowed to evolve. Written about a close friend and shaped over time, the track holds that tension between distance and connection that comes with real-life relationships, especially when lives…
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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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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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Our Rating 7/10 Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon doesn’t rap like he’s trying to impress you. He raps like he already knows he can. As of Now is long, loose, and deliberately personality-driven. It opens with humour. Not throwaway humour. Sharp, slightly absurd, meme-aware humour that immediately establishes tone. He understands the internet age of rap, but…
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The UK government has formally launched the review of the BBC’s Royal Charter, the constitutional framework that sets the broadcaster’s mission, governance, public purposes and funding model. The current Charter expires at the end of 2027. The next Charter will define the BBC’s direction from January 2028 onwards. This is not routine administration but a…
The Industry Review 