Britain’s secret superstars – and why you haven’t heard of them

What do these four have in common: London-born X Factor reject Ella Mai; Liverpudlian choirboy-turned-rocker Banners; introverted Oxbridge ukulele-player Cavetown; and a peripatetic Scot who learned to sing in Tokyo’s karaoke bars before re-naming herself after her parents’ hometown, Bishop Briggs? The answer is that they are among Britain’s biggest pop exports – yet almost no one in Britain has heard of them.

All four have scored more than a billion streams around the world and charted in the US, but they haven’t had a single UK top 40 hit between them. Last year alone, they each notched up more than 250 million streams, reaching listeners in places as far flung as Brazil, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, India, Canada, Turkey and Ukraine. Ella Mai has won a Grammy award but could walk her home streets of south London unrecognised. Banners’s 2017 anthem Someone to You has been streamed 1.5 billion times worldwide, but he kicks off a UK tour tonight in a cramped Glasgow club with a capacity of 500.

So if these young British stars are so successful globally, why aren’t they household names at home? “We’re a small island,” says Chaz Jenkins, the British-based chief commercial officer of music industry analytics company Chartmetric. “Streaming has made music global. Every unsigned bedroom artist today can instantly release music to 200 countries, before they’ve even played a gig. Fundamentally, if you’re big in the UK, you’re big in a country with 68 million people. If you’re big globally, you’re big in a market with 9 billion people. That’s where superstars are made now.”

Earlier this month, Harry Styles won all the major awards at the Brits and the Grammys, anointing the ex-boyband charmer from Worcestershire as superstar of the year. His third album, Harry’s House, topped annual charts on both sides of the Atlantic, while his single As It Was became the most streamed song in the world. It’s the kind of visible success that suggests Britain’s status as one part of an Anglo-American axis that has dominated popular music since Beatlemania in the 1960s is secure.

But there are other ways of looking at it. By most measures, the biggest pop star in the world right now is neither British nor American. It is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, a rapper-singer from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny has been the most streamed artist on Spotify for three years running and had the highest grossing tour of 2022, raking in $435.88 million.

And he is not alone. Chartmetric measures the popularity of artists across all major streaming services (including Spotify, Apple and YouTube) and social media platforms (such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok) along with radio airplay and Amazon playlists, to create a convincing global chart. This week, Puerto Rico (a territory of 2.5 million) has four acts in that international top 50, where you can also find artists from South Korea, Colombia, Canada, Barbados, Brazil, India, Argentina, Nigeria and France. Only one British artist is currently ranked in Chartmetric’s global top 10: Ed Sheeran, at number nine. But it gets stranger still. “There’s only one American in the top five trending artists today,” says Jenkins – referring to pop-rock superstar Miley Cyrus. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago.”

Last year, Rob Stringer, British chairman of Sony Music Group (current home of Harry Styles) made a blunt assessment of the situation: “UK acts have lost their advantage,” he said. “Music is coming from everywhere now.”

Streaming may have saved the music business – but it is also changing it beyond recognition. According to the latest report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, global recorded music revenues are at an all-time high, with the market expanding 18.5 per cent in 2021, to a total of more than $25.9 billion. Britain has benefited from the boom, with exports growing 13.7 per cent to £590.8 million in 2021 (more than double what it was in 2010) according to the British Phonographic Industry’s 2021 report All Around the World. But there is a sting in the tail. “While the UK is seeing revenue growth from exports, our market share is declining,” says BPI head, Geoff Taylor, pointing to a fall from 17 per cent in 2015 to around 10 per cent today. In other words, as the world music pie grows bigger, our slice is getting smaller.

“From the 1960s onwards, the British music industry was a machine,” notes Jenkins. “British success abroad meant more money to sign more artists, produce more recordings, and export them around the world. For decades, the blueprint was to break the home market, then international teams would go around the world and get every other country to follow the plan. The digital world completely and utterly destroyed the oligopoly that the British and Americans had.”

Domestic markets worldwide are experiencing explosive growth: in Europe, growth in 2021 was 3.5 per cent, but in Asia it was 9.5 per cent and Latin America 15.9 per cent. One result has been an influx of revenue into foreign record labels. No longer just links on the supply chains of major labels, countries from Nigeria to Argentina now have budgets to develop and promote their own acts. And it is clearly having an impact. The last British band to break big worldwide was Arctic Monkeys, with their fifth album, AM, in 2013. That was 10 years ago. The last new UK artist to unequivocally achieve superstar status at home and abroad was dance singer Dua Lipa, launched in 2017.

“In a globalised market, if you break an artist in the UK, you’re reaching one and a half per cent of the world’s population,” says Jenkins. “That doesn’t really make a dent in the algorithms which streaming services and social networks use.”

Indeed, algorithms may well be the key to all this. There is more music available to be heard now that at any time in history. Over 100,000 tracks are uploaded every single day. Over 8.5 million artists are currently competing for our attention. Algorithmically curated playlists have become the most popular tool for making sense of all this noise and discovering new music, replacing traditional sources such as broadcast media, music critics, and even local live circuits. But because such algorithms are engineered for global platforms, they reflect and magnify popularity on a worldwide rather than a local basis. So you can be number one in the UK, but if you’re not trending in Asia, Africa, North and South America, then you’re not going to break out of Britain.

“When something’s trending, algorithms push it out automatically to even more people, so it gets more popular,” Jenkins explains. “When people get bored and start skipping tracks, those algorithms pull back that content. If these algorithms see that an artist is only popular in one place, the UK, it won’t get pushed to the rest of the world. Today, an artist needs to find an audience in lots of different countries, then the algorithms will push their music to more people, on a global level.”

Effectively, algorithms have become the tail that wags the dog. And some places are taking notice. “Puerto Rico is a small island. South Korea has two-thirds of the population of the UK,” says Jenkins. “But there’s a sense of direction, innovation and entrepreneurship about how they discover and market artists. They’re not stuck in the past.”

Here, whether by accident or design, is where Britain’s secret superstars come in. While the established British music industry has ploughed on with business as usual, more nimble, independent artists have been able to seize the initiative. Back in 2014, Ella Mai was part of an RnB trio who didn’t even get past auditions for the 11th series of X Factor. But, when she got noticed on Instagram by American producer DJ Mustard, she relocated to the US to work with him in 2015, scoring a number one in the US RnB chart – the first in a series of American hits – just three years later.

Scottish singer-songwriter Sarah McLaughlin (aka Bishop Briggs) was raised in London and Hong Kong before completing her education at music school in Los Angeles, giving her the international perspective to promote her dark pop rock in multiple territories. Her 618 million YouTube views reflect a fanbase that encompasses the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine and South Korea.

Banners is the alias of Michael Nelson, who grew up singing with the Liverpool Cathedral Choir. He relocated to Toronto in 2015 to work with Canadian producer Steve Kozmeniuk, developing an anthemic pop rock sound akin to Coldplay. It might have been deemed uncool in the UK but 2 billion streams prove it still has huge resonance worldwide.

Cavetown is Robin Skinner, a quirky, folky singer-songwriter who rose to success with his own video channel, uploading covers of songs played on ukulele. By creating a lot of niche content, he quietly built an audience of 3.6 million Spotify followers and over 2 million YouTube subscribers, with many of his tracks achieving huge viral success via TikTok and other platforms. Because streaming platforms are global, if an artist can find their way on to lots of their playlists, they can forge a career without necessarily becoming huge in any one place. And then algorithms will do the rest.

There are some signs that UK music is waking up to this new paradigm. Dua Lipa benefited from a concerted strategy by her label (Warners) and management company (TaP Music) to break her internationally at the same time as in the UK. The campaign behind Sam Ryder’s impressive showing at the Eurovision Song Contest last year was run by the same management company, using Ryder’s 12.5 million international TikTok fanbase to target European audiences. Even this year’s reigning British king of pop, Harry Styles, had an established global fanbase owing to his former membership of One Direction.

Britain can still lay claim to being a musical superpower. Among the top 10 acts with the highest grossing live tours worldwide of 2022, over half were British: Elton John (at 2), Ed Sheeran (3), Styles (4), Coldplay (5), the Rolling Stones (6) and Def Leppard (at 8, on a joint tour with US rockers Mötley Crüe). Moreover, Forbes’s assessment of the highest-earning celebrities in the world last year was also dominated by British musicians. Genesis ($230 million) and Sting ($210 million) took the top positions, with the Rolling Stones at 7 ($98 million), all beating hotshot US pop superstar Taylor Swift, who earned a mere $92 million.

What’s worrying is how many of those names are long-established, vintage artists. Genesis and Sting’s huge profits came from selling their song catalogues for hundreds of millions in 2022, while Elton John is on his farewell tour, which may also prove the case for the Rolling Stones. Even the fortysomething Coldplay have been contemplating retirement, announcing plans to cease recording in 2025. That sound you can hear is the old guard cashing in on one last big pay day before they shuffle off the stage.

The billion-dollar question is: who is going to replace them? Jenkins suggests that the British music industry widens its search parameters. “If you can identify UK artists already building even a little bit of an audience in lots of other countries, those are your stars of the future,” he says. “Because it means that algorithmically – but also realistically – those artists are capable of engaging with an audience in the billions, rather than just millions.”

It is strange to think that the next generation of British superstars might be already out there, not hacking their way around grassroots venues from Land’s End to John O’Groats but propping up playlists from São Paolo to Seoul.