The UK music industry boomed in 2025: So why are artists struggling?

There is immense energy, fuelled no doubt by the difficult times of uncertainty and rage at the corrupt, incompetent and prejudicial older generations clogging up progression like an immovable fog of pate. Such circumstances have always provoked cultural kickbacks from teens, think of 50s rock n roll, 60s garage rock, 70s punk, 80s hip hop, gangsta rap, acid house…. While you’d struggle to identify a breakthrough new scene as such, a diverse, splintered and spiky crop is coming through and the world continues to take notice of what we produce. If there has been a major scene, it’s ‘hyperpop’, led by Charli xcx, who has become one of the biggest stars on the planet without watering down her distinctly British take on pop stardom, which is all-swearing, all-messy, all-attitude, and winningly insouciant. A one-woman Rolling Stones, as it were. She is signed to Atlantic of course, but the point is she demonstrates the appeal of music that, as we say here, ‘goes off on one’. Something AI simply cannot produce (although it can copy).