writing
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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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I recently watched Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere and honestly, it’s less a documentary and more an autopsy, not of masculinity, but of what happens when insecurity gets monetised and handed a microphone. It lays bare the social rot that parts of the internet have become, not chaotic but corrosive, engineered even, a space where…
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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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Our Rating: 10/10 From the opening line, “Take a look at the world today; we have got to find a better way,” this track lands exactly where it needs to. It is as emotional as it is liberating. And when that line keeps coming back, it doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels absolutely necessary. Because we…
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Our Rating 8/10 Some songs arrive loudly. Others move quietly, like someone stepping into a room and simply standing there until everyone notices. “Grace”, the new single from Irish alt-pop artist Chubby Cat, belongs firmly in the second category. Built around a sparse electronic foundation, the track leans into atmosphere rather than immediacy. Soft synth…
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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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Our Rating 10/10 Music has long been described as a healing force. Not the clinical sort found in a pharmacy, but the quieter medicine that settles somewhere deep in the chest when the right song arrives at the right moment. When I pressed play on “Golden Thing,” the new single from West Cork songwriter Molly…
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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…
The Industry Review 