049/ The 'Sound of 2025' poll descends into farce
The BBC’s annual Sound Of… poll has always been a disingenuous music industry puff. But this year it’s so laugh-out-loud daft, it seems to be deliberately rendering itself useless.
Back in the day, it took me a few years to chill out about the BBC’s end of year Sound Of… poll, which creates a chart pre-empting of the following year’s breakout artists. Eventually I learnt to leave it alone, to exist as a piece of fun, despite misgivings.
Since its inception, there’s always been an iffy sleight-of-hand on display, at the heart of how it operates, which for me crossed a line into deceit. I’ve written about it before: how Sound Of… functions as an act of commercial prediction, yet cosplays as an artistic competition. It wears the false sense of quality-based, or talent-based assessment, when in fact it’s a pure numbers game: music biz professionals taking part are asked to guess which acts they think will ‘break the biggest’ the following year. So in truth they’re assessing how they see levels of investment into those acts by the big companies, along with guesswork on the enthusiasm of the early grass-roots fanbase.
It’s key to note: these ‘experts’ are not expressing a preference, nor anything about the quality of the emerging acts, they are just solely guessing the likelihood of commercial success. Basically, it’s a big poll asking “does it scale?” with the whole thing built on insider instinct about who is being prioritised, by which companies, and by how much.
That’s fine of course. Except that the front-end window dressing of the poll on the Beeb at the end of each year obfuscates that ‘commercial guesswork’ backbone, instead presenting as an emerging talent contest.
But I let it all go. So, what’s my issue now?
This year, half of the acts listed already had their breakthrough year.
Chappell Roan being on a Sound Of… poll list is hilarious. Her 100k plus selling album is over a year old. Her ferocious, phenomenal breakthrough already happened back in spring and continued to build over summer. Even ignoring the streaming numbers (which are bonkers) she smashed last summer’s American festival circuit to pieces, has six Grammy nominations, she’s been 2024’s hottest ‘new’ artist in the world. Her short UK tour a couple of months ago sold out four nights at Brixton Academy in moments — and there were enough attempts to buy UK tickets to have filled Wembley Stadium.
So it’s ludicrous to think of Roan as an ‘emerging act’ for 2025, unless your scope for assessment is so narrowband nationalist that it includes artists who are already wholly confirmed superstars, but who are perhaps just turning a little more of their attention on the UK in the coming year. Roan’s already here, big time: all summer, her bangers on high rotation in bars, coffee shops, clothing outlets in Britain, like everywhere else. She didn’t just get the one new hit with ‘Good Luck, Babe’, half the upbeat cuts from her debut became belated sleeper hits too. If you’ve got even half an eye on culture (or kids) you’ll already know ‘Pink Pony Club’, ‘HOT TO GO!’ and ‘Red Wine Supernova’.
I wrote an ‘explainer’ article (for here) about how great Chappell Roan is, then decided not to publish it, because she’d risen so incredibly fast, I realised you’d already be up to speed. That was back in April.
Meanwhile, not one but two of the British artists on the long list, English Teacher and Ezra Collective, already won the Mercury Prize. Wait, so wasn’t that their breakthrough moment? Or is Sound Of 2025 deliberately trolling the Mercury for a laugh, emphasising the struggling award’s decaying influence?
So mean.
Then, surely to the gods, Kneecap, Barry Can’t Swim, Doechii and Confidence Man — all already major big stage festivals acts — are too successful and cruising down the road of their own careers to need consideration? It’s like Sound Of… is frantically trying to catch up with acts they missed out on when they were genuinely ‘emerging’.
What on earth are the rules, then? What are categories of ‘unknown-ness’ / anonymity / newness that ought to ensure artists of this stature aren’t on the list?
“they also must not already be widely known by the UK general public”
“artists can not have had more than two UK Top 10 albums or two UK Top 10 singles prior to 30 September 2024.”
wtaf.
It’s down to charts, and defining the ‘general public’ as ever more ignorant, and different institutions gaming each-other. Well, that’s a bigger, stupider, yet more complex problem of a splintered mass culture, and irrelevance and outdatedness, than I can dig into. Though I’m genuinely surprised Chappell Roan hasn’t yet had two UK Top 10 singles. I guess the rotation of quite a few different songs without a formal single release dilutes each individual song’s chances, or something?
For me, the one (modest) value the Sound Of… list offered over the past decade, was to introduce us to a collection of new-ish, emerging artists for the coming year, signalling that whichever business had signed them up was taking a significant punt on them. Essentially an early marketing tool, for industry priorities. You could ignore the ordering of the chart and just check out everyone on the long list and, each year, some of those would go on to be be significant global names.
Earlier in the 2010s, it even got the winners and high charters correct a few times, though as that decade rolled on, and especially into the 2020s, it has lost its way in that respect. Let’s play that game for a minute:
In 2016, when Jack Garratt won and Alessia Cara came second, artists who were on the list but didn’t make the Top 5 included Dua Lipa, Loyle Carner and Mabel.
In 2018 Sigrid won (fair play, she’s done great) with Rex Orange County and IAMDDB second and third. However artists on that year’s list who didn’t make the Top 5 included Lewis Capaldi, Sam Fender, Nilafur Yanya and someone called Billie Eilish.
In 2020 Celeste won, while Arlo Parks and Beabadoobee didn’t make the Top 5.
Utilising it as a list, while ignoring the arbitrary hierarchy, was always a better approach.
But now, Sound of 2025 has nothing to do with any of that, nor anything else of worth. This is the year Sound Of…’s embarrassing generation gap poked through its trousers. Thus, it becomes a poll that exists to loudly tell grandma what everyone else was already listening to.
The greater challenge, of course, is that (everywhere, but especially in the UK) the conventionally understood hierarchy and success roadmaps that we’ve used for decades are collapsing. Albums and singles charts aren’t fit for purpose, in terms of measuring tangible success (that’s one for another time) and neither is radio play, nor even television exposure, since it’s gamified and/or rarified and/or gatekept. With very, very rare exceptions, moments in the spotlight, performances on TV or radio that used to be total career makers, now barely cause an uptick in sales.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing but the people who’ve been running the business side for a long time clearly are struggling to keep up. So really, the silly strangeness of Sound of 2025 is a symptom, not a cause. It probably doesn’t matter — but it’s a pity that even such a deeply flawed system for introducing us to new talent is giving up the ghost.
More than anything else it’s more evidence we need a radical overhaul of how the entire thing works. Okay, that’s two Double Chorus editions in a row just slagging things off. Next time I’ll try to be nicer.
icymi —
• The Magnetic Fields do Tiny Desk.
• New Kim Deal song ‘Nobody Loves You More’.
• First taste of the next Sam Fender album, ‘People Watching’ beautiful anthemic pop with purpose, sounds a bit Waterboys to me.
• I promised no more Charli, especially while I finish the book, but her fierce tilt at ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ on SNL is blistering. The intense low, angled ceiling and black-and-white lighting reminds me of Kanye’s brilliant stage set at Glasto that time (which he wasted on a dismal performance)