Britain has another new British Prime Minister from today – music-loving Andy Burnham, the first 6 Music Dad to lead the country. He even turned up to the O2 Silver Clef Awards this month to present James with an award.
Burnham has vowed to launch a No.10 North alongside the traditional London power base. Following the government’s newly announced Music Plan, here AIM CEO Gee Davy welcomes the new PM to the role with a call to back the independent music sector with key measures to support the SMEs taking risks to discover, record, and market new talent and emerging genres...
Congratulations today to Andy Burnham, now making his way to two No.10s, and putting in place the excellent Michael Dugher as the government's Music Champion, and to Lisa Nandy and the DCMS for producing a comprehensive launchpad for music with the Turn It Up: A Plan For Music announced last week.
Andy Burnham’s mastery of cultural soft power as mayor of Manchester is widely acknowledged. From establishing the Greater Manchester Music Commission and the Beyond The Music festival, to successful lobbying to bring large shows to Northern England, winning the backing of artists like Elbow’s Guy Garvey. No Prime Minister has held such innate appreciation for the important role music plays in British life.
Burnham’s track record is deeply artist- and venue-focused. His campaign pledge to slash business rates for independent live music spaces by 20% offers a vital lifeline to our embattled night-time economy. A focus on live music support is also evident in the Plan For Music.
AIM CEO Gee Davy
But live music is only half of the equation to deliver results for artists and fans. Independent labels, distributors and solo entrepreneurs represent 99% of all recorded music businesses in the UK and release the majority of our new music. Without these agile SMEs taking risks to discover, record and market new talent and emerging genres, any resurgence of British music will be for the very few – not for the diverse talent from scenes across the UK.
There is a lot to celebrate in the plan to ‘Turn It Up’. Policymakers consulted widely and clearly appreciate the need for a holistic approach to our highly interconnected industry to ultimately provide truly supportive scaffolding for artists. It shows understanding of the multiple income streams and structures that support a long term sustainable artistic career. And the plan has made the clearest statement from government to date that AI must license where it uses music.
However, as Mercury winners Ezra Collective – actually included as a government case study in the plan – recently pointed out in The Guardian, musicians feel they cannot rely on government support for music. Similarly, though many independent businesses appreciate and may need some urgent short term boosts from government funding and access to loans, they seek self-reliance through commercial success in the longer term, so that they can continue to invest in talent and act as reliable partners for artists.
To that end, the plan is missing a key pillar needed to support independent music, the cultural-commercial engine that drives the entire industry from within scenes across the UK. That is, by addressing the financial risk of recording and releasing new music. Without this, the plan risks building the launchpad but not fueling the rockets.
A tax relief for new music creation could be the single most transformative lever Andy Burnham could pull to supercharge the whole British music sector
Gee Davy
We are witnessing a worrying shift in global music economics as major labels and investors focus heavily on the predictable income of legacy catalogues, and signing frontline artists through US operations. Universal Music Group’s latest reports show back catalogue music now accounts for 66% of recorded revenues – up from 54% just a few years ago.
The consequences are clear. Under the surface of a seemingly steady domestic market, UK Music’s This Is Music report shows that from 2023-2024, our rate of export growth halved, and the UK has dropped from three artists in the global top 20 streaming rankings to zero in just a year.
Meanwhile, the financial risk of developing UK talent has dramatically increased due to the increased costs of business, for which SMEs bear a heavier brunt. Just look at this week’s charts data, which shows that only two newly released British albums from 2026 (Harry Styles and Raye – both supported by major labels) cracked the Top 40 biggest releases of the year.
In this way, independent music is the economic canary in the coalmine for the situation underlying the whole recorded music sector. That the economics of the financial risk in music creation are not working for many across the UK, harming our fantastic studios, other production facilities and workers and diminishing our ability to develop artists to breakthrough in the increasingly competitive global music market.
Reversing this domestic music slump will involve pulling a number of levers, and the Plan For Music sets out welcome support for some of the symptoms. But it does not currently address the root cause. Burnham must insist it go further, and work alongside the industry to investigate the economic conditions for recording and releasing new music.
Independent labels act as a primary economic engine supporting not just the featured artists signed to them directly, but also an array of workers including producers, engineers, and session musicians across the UK, and also visual artists, videographers, and other non-music creatives.
James with Andy Burnham at the O2 Silver Clef Awards (credit: JM Enternational/Getty)
After years of post-Brexit and post-Covid inflation, rising employment, business, export, touring, supplier, and myriad other costs, as well as shifts in streaming payment systems that reduce early-stage streaming revenues and those of certain genres, these SME businesses are feeling the strain on all sides. Many are downsizing, cutting back, or being forced out of business entirely. When they enter survival mode, budgets for production, touring and marketing shrink, and fewer risks are taken on new talent.
An evidence-led review commissioned by government is the crucial first step. We expect that it will reveal the need for a tailored new music creation tax relief scheme, covering the pivotal moment when intellectual property is born through the recording. We look to the highly successful UK film tax relief and the French phonographic model as examples of how this intervention can show financial returns and pay dividends for culture and financial autonomy.
Such a scheme would de-risk investment in new music, ensure a client base for beleaguered studios and workers, and free up vital funding for other areas to benefit the success of the release and the artist’s career.
As proven by the French model, when independent labels can offset heavy upfront studio, development, and marketing costs against tax, they can then deploy those freed-up resources into the exact areas where emerging artists currently face the biggest challenges: underwriting the early loss-making tours crucial to building an audience, nurturing local talent across the country, and deploying the marketing firepower needed to turn UK artists into breakthroughs and then into global success stories.
Remarkably, recorded music remains the only major UK creative sector without a tailored creation tax relief, the outlier compared to film, TV, video games, and orchestras. From chart-topping newcomers like Wet Leg, Ezra Collective, Jorja Smith and Barry Can’t Swim, to global icons like Adele, FKA Twigs and Arctic Monkeys, independent businesses have shown that worldwide commercial success can coexist comfortably with an independent ethos and fair contract terms.
A tax relief for new music creation could be the single most transformative lever Andy Burnham could pull to supercharge the whole British music sector.
MAIN PHOTO: Andy Burnham at the O2 Silver Clef Awards (credit: JM Enternational/Getty)
