This Is Not America

British music doesn’t need to copy the world. It needs to be itself again.

Two reports came out this week, and between them they tell a story that ought to make us sit up a little straighter in our chairs.

The first is the 2025 global bestseller data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Across the top 20 singles and the top 20 albums in the entire world there is one British act. One. Lola Young’s “Messy” comes in at number 11. A superb result for her, a quietly alarming one for a country that once treated the global charts as an extension of the domestic league table. The rest of that space is filled by the United States and South Korea, with a brief stop in Puerto Rico and Japan. Taylor Swift at the summit with The Life of a Showgirl. Morgan Wallen close behind. Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter, Stray Kids, SZA, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Mrs Green Apple. On the singles side, Rosé and Bruno Mars’ “APT” sits at number one, the first global chart-topper to feature non-English lyrics. The wind is blowing east and west, and we are somewhere in the middle wondering when it changed direction.

The second report, from the BBC, looks at what people in UK cities are actually listening to on Spotify and YouTube. It turns out that from Belfast to Brighton, from Glasgow to Cardiff, the dominant names are Taylor Swift and Drake on Spotify, Eminem and the Demon Hunters soundtrack on YouTube, with regional variations that tell you more about modern Britain than any census ever could. In Birmingham, Indian and Punjabi artists feature heavily. In Liverpool, female pop stars rule the roost. In Newcastle, Sam Fender manages to beat Drake on his own turf. Coldplay appear to be a geographical constant. Oasis, three decades after they first clattered into the nation’s consciousness, are still punching above their weight, reunion fever carrying them into the top five in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

If you stare at those two datasets long enough, a pattern emerges. It is not that Britain has stopped loving music. Quite the opposite. We are listening more widely, more globally, more promiscuously than ever before. The pattern is that British music, as a distinct global export, is shrinking in relative weight. Not disappearing, shrinking.

Now, the lazy response is to ask where all the great British artists have gone. As if they are keys we left on s shelf somewhere in the Britpop years and have been meaning to look for ever since. But that question misses something fundamental about how British music has historically worked.

Our biggest artists did not arrive on the global stage sounding like pale imitations of somebody else. They arrived sounding unmistakably British. The Beatles did not try to be American. They filtered American rhythm and blues through Liverpool. The Clash did not attempt to out-New York New York. They sounded like West London in a temper. Oasis did not emerge from a focus group. They came out of Manchester with a chip on their shoulder. Adele did not sing like Nashville. She sounded like Tottenham with heartbreak.

That distinctiveness was not accidental. It was forged in a uniquely British cauldron of creativity that is, even now, one of the best in the world. Small rooms in every town. Promoters who take stupid risks because they believe in a band. Independent labels run out of cramped offices. Damp rehearsal spaces above shops. Recording studios that smell faintly of coffee and ambition. Regular readers of this column will know only too well what has been happening to that ecosystem over the last decade. Venues under pressure. Promoters squeezed. Studios closing. Rehearsal rooms converted into flats. Labels consolidating or disappearing. The foundations creaking.

We do not need to rehearse the statistics again here. You know them and I know them all too well. Because the point here is not the number of closures or the margin percentages. The point is that we let the environment which once allowed artists to become strange and local and particular be thinned out, despite all the warnings by angry faced people like me on the national news every week, and this is the result.

As the globalisation of music took hold, powered by companies that don’t care about national scenes, they just want your credit card and your data, we should have been doubling down on that distinctiveness. Instead we ignored all the warnings and drifted in the opposite direction. There has been a creeping temptation to chase the sound of whatever is currently winning globally, to iron out the regional accent, to smooth off the odd edges. A wild rush to aim for playlist compatibility rather than local ferocity by replicating the American model or by attempting to mimic the industrial precision of Korean pop.

We will never out-America America. We will never out-Korea Korea. Those systems are deeply embedded, culturally and commercially. They are built to do exactly what they are doing. Trying to replicate them is a bit like deciding the best way to save British cuisine is to open more branch copies of somebody else’s restaurant. And most importantly we have no need to do that, because we have always been the best at being who we are in the way we are.

What we have, and what we have always had, is something different. A messy, argumentative, regionally diverse, gloriously inconsistent network that produces artists who sound like where they are from. It produces Sam Fender singing in a Geordie accent about the North and beating Drake in Newcastle because people recognise themselves in him. It produces artists who do not quite fit any global template and therefore create a new one. It produces voices that are rooted before they are exported.

The streaming era has flattened the field. A teenage music fan in Leeds can jump from Seoul to Atlanta to Bogotá in a matter of seconds. That is culturally thrilling, but it is also unforgiving. The tech platforms reward scale and momentum, meaning the biggest names just get bigger and bigger, squeezing out distinctiveness and flattening the music landscape in a way which is inherently against the sound of our towns and cities. In that environment, the only thing that truly cuts through long term is authenticity. Not authenticity as a marketing slogan, but authenticity as something formed in friction with a real place and a real audience.

The irony of all this is that we are at the point in the cultural curve where music consumers are becoming tired of the tidal wave of algorithm-created hits, and justifiably wary of a tsunami of AI slop which will suit no-one but the shareholders of the world’s biggest platforms. As that turning point arrives, Britain is almost uniquely well placed to deliver music that has always been ‘the real thing’. Our history of global success was not built on homogeneity. It was built on difference. The sound of Liverpool. The sound of Manchester. The sound of Bristol. The sound of Glasgow. Scenes that were hyperlocal before they were international. Artists who had done the miles in small rooms before they ever saw a stadium.

Look again at the IFPI charts. One sole British act in the top 20 singles or 20 albums. That is not a talent problem. It is a distinctiveness problem. It is what happens when the pipeline that once converted local heat into global fire is weakened, and when the industry starts to look outward for inspiration rather than inward for confidence.

There is no shame in admiring what America or Korea have achieved. The globalisation of music has been one of the most exciting cultural developments of the last two decades. The fact that a non-English song can top the global singles chart tells you something beautiful about the world we now live in. But for the UK, admiration should not tip into imitation. Our strength has never been replication, it has been reinvention.

We are in danger of throwing away the very thing that made British music matter on the world stage; a brilliant grassroots ecosystem that allowed artists to develop distinctive voices in public, to fail and try again, to argue with their audience, to reflect their communities. We should not be sanding that down in the hope of fitting a global mould, we should be piling into it with even more force. More investment in the rooms. More support for the promoters. More protection for the studios and rehearsal spaces. More confidence in the idea that a strong accent and a stubborn point of view are not barriers to global success but the precondition for it.

The worldwide data this week is not a death knell. It is a warning light. British music has not stopped being interesting. It has simply risked forgetting why it was interesting in the first place. If we want to see more than one British name in those global top 20 lists again, we do not need to become more like someone else. We need to remember who we are, and build the kind of environment that lets that identity ring out, loud and unapologetic, from the smallest room to the biggest stage.