Electronic Sound  |  Issue 121
News stories about the business of music in 2024 fell into two broad categories. Firstly, some Very Famous Pop Stars are raking in seriously large amounts of cash. Secondly, artists who aren’t Very Famous Pop Stars can’t make anything approaching a living from music these days. Even Kate Nash, who is a Quite Famous Pop Star, is selling pictures of her bottom on OnlyFans to help fund her tour.
For lots of UK artists, the situation has been exacerbated by the closure of countless small venues following the pandemic and the post-Brexit difficulties of touring in Europe. That’s not the whole story, though. Despite all the above, the UK’s underground music scene remains as inventive and productive as ever. The fierce creative spirit hasn’t been broken, however challenging the financial realities might be now, and that’s particularly true of the spiralling number of grassroots electronic musicians out there. Which is why, for our first issue of 2025, we are shining a light on as many of those artists as we can. We’ve always supported independent and emerging talent at Electronic Sound – we’ve reviewed releases on almost 2,500 different labels since the magazine started 12 years ago – but we wanted to take it a step further. Part of the reason for that is because we’re a grassroots operation ourselves.
So you won’t find our usual run of interviews this month. Instead, we’re amplifying and celebrating the unstoppable buzz of UK underground electronica through regional reports, label profiles and Bandcamp recommendations, plus a weighty round table discussion involving 17 key players. The issue has also turned out to be something of a rallying call,
a reminder that we need to support these artists, to buy their albums and show up at their gigs, to play an active role in the growing audience for electronic music and spread the word about this incredible scene as far and wide as we can.
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Articles in this issue
Below is a selection of articles in Electronic Sound Issue 121.