This weekend’s Brit Awards was a show of strength for the UK’s music industry, from Olivia Dean’s awards sweep to barnstorming performances from Harry Styles, Raye and Wolf Alice.
However, the boss of management body the MMF, Annabella Coldrick, has issued a warning that this is not the whole story.
“Troubling warning lights are flashing – and have been for some time,” she wrote in a blog post on Medium. “We need to acknowledge the evidence that UK artists are struggling to be heard at home and begin to explore solutions to address the challenge.”
Coldrick has the receipts for that belief, noting that only 15 of the UK’s top 40 albums were made with the involvement of a UK artist last year – and 10 of those were catalogue records. Meanwhile, only 20% of the top 100 tracks in the UK last year were performed by British artists.
“It is becoming increasingly hard for UK artists to achieve both domestic breakthrough and global traction,” suggested Coldrick, pointing to “a shift to passive listening” as one of the key factors.
“A 2025 report by Midia suggests that 75% of music streamers usually listen in passive ways), today, for many listeners, the ‘search’ bar is rarely used, they simply open the app and let the platform play,” she wrote.
“Combine that with the super-release-cycles of US megastars like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Bruno Mars, UK artists currently find themselves at a distinct structural disadvantage as streaming services suggest to ’play next’ what is most popular in the pool of English language pop.”
Among the solutions proposed in the post are “deeper collaborations between DSPs and public broadcasters that drive local, human-led curation; and secondly, to develop more proactive and coordinated export and funding strategies for music.”
However, the post also floats an idea that streaming services are certain to push back on firmly.
“While I suspect many in the UK would squirm at the idea of quotas, despite their use in markets like Canada and France, there is a clear need to engage more deeply with streaming platforms and ensure they are consistently spotlighting the full depth and diversity of British talent – rather than outsourcing curation to a global algorithm,” wrote Coldrick.
“We should also be exploring ideas like the Irish Homegrown chart supported by RTE which has coincided with a purple patch for Irish music by shining a light on talent that otherwise wouldn’t feature in Ireland’s domestic Top 40.”
Source link