Earlier this week the BBC announced its Sound of 2016 long list, featuring fifteen young artists selected by an influential cross-section of the British music press as representing the best of new British pop. The prize has helped springboard some of Britain’s most influential contemporary musicians including Adele, Ellie Goulding and Sam Smith. This year’s list, though, emerges at a particularly fraught time for the corporation. With its Charter Renewal just around the corner and £150m of budget cuts looming, this is an opportunity for the corporation to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the digitized music ecology.
So to what extent does this year’s list showcase the uniqueness of the BBC? As a public service broadcaster the BBC is under pressure to uphold certain standards that are not necessarily true of commercial broadcasters. Music content on the BBC is never merely entertainment but always embedded within a ‘national culture’; a nebulous concept but one that the BBC perhaps more than any other institution is required to grapple with. When considering its contribution to music this means it must be judged according to what it does ‘in addition’ to the free-market that controls the industry more broadly.
The BBC is not just a business and in theory at least no board of trustees and politicians should be able to dictate its fate. It belongs to all who pay the licence fee, and arguably several thousand who don’t. Certain questions can be asked of the Sound of 2016, then, that are bound up with this concept of public service broadcasting. Is the selection of a sufficiently high quality? Was it decided democratically? Do the artists reflect the diversity of the British music scene? Finally, does the list offer something that you wouldn’t find elsewhere, a form of organizing, an authority or a common space that isn’t present when scrolling through YouTube and Spotify?
