Faith Richards continues her ascent in the R&B world with the arrival of her latest single “Private Star” as she prepares for a definitive creative year. Co-produced with longtime collaborator Jordan Iacovella, known as Prairies, the track showcases an artist in full command of her cinematic sound. This release provides the foundation for her sophomore album which arrives in the summer of 2026. The song captures a striking duality born from a writing process that bridged her time in Paris and her current home in Dallas.
The composition process reflects a significant evolution in Richards’ personal and vocal confidence. “I was definitely in two completely different places in my life,” Richards says of the track’s timeline. “In Paris, I was confidently single and writing nonstop. When I finished the song years later, I was completely in love and much more confident in my voice and perspective.” This growth translates into a record that feels both intimate and expansive.
The sonic landscape is an intentional blend of dark pop and alternative R&B influences. Richards drew inspiration from the powerful presence of a dancer in a private room to craft an atmosphere of magnetic control. This single moves with a deliberate and alluring energy that defines her current musical direction. The production choices highlight a sophisticated approach to soulful storytelling that resonates with global audiences.
Richards describes her upcoming album as a project defined by instinct and liberation from traditional structures. This new body of work follows a successful history of independent releases including her debut album ‘I’ll Bloom When I’m Ready’ and her 2019 EPs. “It’s so freeing to not be bound by structure or genre,” she notes regarding the new sessions. “I feel like I’m creating my best and most authentic art yet.”
Dutch punks Real Farmer release their new single “Missing Link” via Strap Originals, the first new music since their EP ‘RF II’ arrived in May. The track is lifted from the band’s upcoming second album ‘Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right’, slated for spring 2026 release, and arrives amid the band’s biggest UK shows to date supporting Babyshambles at Coventry Empire, Norwich LCR, and Brixton Academy. On “Missing Link” it feels like Real Farmer are more in charge of their expression than ever before. The battering ram drums and punk spirit remain, but through dabbling with a new armory of guitar effects and shifting the balance between lead vocals and bassist Marrit’s hypnotic backing vocals onto more equal footing, it feels like new territory. This is their least austere number yet, embracing the boogie whilst frontman Jeroen’s stonking delivery of a poetic tirade indicates a life on the edge.
To record the video, Real Farmer travelled to Margate, Kent and linked up with music photographer and video maker Roger Sargent, renowned for the iconic sleeve of The Libertines’ second album. The video sees lead singer Jeroen Klootsema and bassist Marrit Meinema portraying primal, blood-thirsty cave dwellers. Director Roger Sargent says, “The dawn of misogyny, a brutal selfish act. It started with a missing link between humans and animals. Trying to depict human evolution and exploitation. For us to thrive something else needs to die.” “Missing Link” was produced by longtime ally Niek Van Den Driesschen and recorded at Far Out Sound Studios in Rotterdam, mastered by Melbourne-based Mikey Young, who works mostly with garage, psych and punk. 2025 has been a busy year for the four-piece, playing festivals including Primavera Sound, The Great Escape, Eurosonic, and The Libertines’ Gunnerbury Park festival, completing their first UK headline tour and playing dozens of shows around Europe. The band emerged from the vibrant Groningen DIY scene in the north of the Netherlands and signed to Peter Doherty’s Strap Originals off the strength of early releases and their reputation as a fierce live act.
From the quiet corners of a Nova Scotia night, Jont’s “Let’s Just Be Friends” emerges as a tender, nocturnal meditation on love and truth, a song that drifts between dreamy romanticism and grounded self-awareness. Jont shares, “Late at night, sat up in bed with my guitar, is how some of my best songs have come. Maybe it was always thus for songwriters, Cohen, Dylan, the muse sitting beside them as the world sleeps. And with my cats Oscar and Buttons beside me, I can be found there too, up late, lights low, guitar in my lap, writing something that’s sprung out of me without warning and demanding my attention.” The song exists in that liminal space between longing and surrender, with lyrics capturing the fleeting, dizzying joy of new connection even as verses quietly predict its impermanence.
Jont reflects on the creative process: “Sometimes it seems the songs know before I do how things are going to go. But we haven’t learnt the lesson until we’ve had enough of the pain. And though over the years the pain might have seemed almost too much to bear, it has also led directly to more fruitful evenings, sat up late at night, guitar in lap, as emotions alchemise and dissolve into a subtle and radiant joy.” “Let’s Just Be Friends” is a study in emotional honesty, its vulnerability resting gently atop warm, stripped-back instrumentation. Since relocating from England to Nova Scotia and discovering fatherhood, Jont’s music has entered its most reflective, tender, and profound phase. With “Let’s Just Be Friends” and the music that will follow beyond 2025, Jont steps into a new creative chapter, one that is at once ambitious, grounded, and profoundly human.
Sunderland’s RYDER crash onto the scene with their debut single “Broken Footsteps”, a sharp hit of indie rock energy featuring Zak Starkey on drums and artwork by visionary cover artist Gareth Halliday. The band blends the timeless energy of brit pop with the raw edge of indie rock, crafting anthemic melodies and reflective lyrics that resonate with anyone seeking authenticity. With catchy riffs and unique style, they stand out by staying true to their roots while pushing musical boundaries. “Broken Footsteps” showcases the songwriting swagger of this Sunderland outfit with a stomping tune that features Starkey’s guest appearance. Signed to producer Nick Brine’s Flip Flop Records and managed by Mancunian Kyle Dale of Bittersweet Home, RYDER have wasted no time. Eleven months together, four months recording their debut album, “Broken Footsteps” is the first taste of what’s coming and it lands with real weight.
Ivor Novello nominated British musician Nia Smith returns with her new single “Limit”, constructed around a James Blake sample from his cover of Feist’s original song. On “Limit”, Nia addresses her feelings within a deteriorating relationship, transforming desperate emotions into an assertion of power and self-determination through her soulful, authoritative delivery. Nia shares her thoughts: “Limit was definitely the hardest to get over the line, it’s been in the making for over a year. We went through about four different choruses and countless versions of the song. But I think that makes it even more rewarding now it’s out. I tried sampling for the first time which was fun and challenging. Limit is a song for the people who’ve had enough and have come to terms with letting go.”
Since releasing ‘Give Up The Fear’, her first EP, the Brixton artist has taken time to refocus on her craft, including a period in Jamaica to gain life experience. The release received praise from Billboard, NME, British Vogue, The Observer, Rolling Stone UK, BBC Radio 1 and more, leading to performances on Later…With Jools and at All Points East, City Splash, Glastonbury via BBC Introducing, and a Rising Star nomination at this year’s Ivor Novello. Nia has also attracted attention from Prada, who invited her to their recent Milan fashion week show and London Prada Mode party. Powerful and technically impressive with tender vulnerability threaded through her storytelling, Nia has honed her live craft through performances at Mahalia Presents at the Jazz Cafe, supporting Pip Millett at Somerset House, supporting Sasha Keable at Lafayette, playing before SZA at BST Hyde Park, and supporting both Jordan Rakei and Elmiene on his US, UK and EU tour.
Great American Ghost unveil the visualizer for their new standalone single “Scars”. The track arrives after the band’s summer cover of “Hole in the Earth”, originally from Deftones’ 2006 album ‘Saturday Night Wrist’. Ethan Harrison explains the decision to release “Scars” separately from their ‘Tragedy of The Commons’ album: “This was the most intense track we laid down during those recording sessions. Looking back at the material, it carried a distinct intensity that warranted its own spotlight rather than being tucked into the album. This represents the most furious moment from that creative period.”
Ask anyone who bought a ticket to a major concert in the nineties what that experience looked like. You drove to a box office, stood in a queue, handed over cash, and received a physical stub kept in a drawer for years. The music was the same. The sweat and noise of the crowd were the same. But the infrastructure surrounding that experience – how you found out about it, how you paid for it, how you shared it afterward – operated at a completely different speed than anything available today.
Entertainment has always generated ecosystems. Films created poster designers, cinema concessions, fan magazines, and eventually video rental stores. Sports created broadcasting rights, merchandise licensing, and fantasy leagues. What digital technology did was not invent this pattern but accelerate it beyond recognition, and simultaneously blur boundaries between categories that used to stay separate. A music fan today might stream an album, watch a tour documentary on a subscription platform, follow a guitarist on social media, bet on which city’s show gets the best setlist reviews, and buy limited merchandise through an Instagram link – all in an afternoon. The infrastructure serving those touch points requires technology that is specialised, scalable, and often invisible to the person using it. The segment of that infrastructure built around predictive engagement and odds platforms – where the best bookies software handles real-time data processing, personalised interfaces, and compliance monitoring across multiple regulatory environments simultaneously – represents one of the most technically demanding verticals in the entertainment stack, because the margin for error when transactions are involved is essentially zero.
How entertainment learned to monetise attention
The shift from ticket sales and physical media to attention-based monetisation is the economic story of the last two decades. Streaming proved that lower-friction access beats ownership for most consumers. Social media proved that content surrounding an entertainment property – the discourse, the reactions, the analysis – can generate as much economic value as the property itself. These two lessons reshaped how every entertainment vertical thinks about its business.
The live events industry is the clearest case study. Concerts and festivals, which looked briefly like casualties of streaming, have become the most resilient segment of music revenue. The reason is partly scarcity – a live performance cannot be replicated at scale the way a recording can – and partly experience design. Modern festival ticketing, dynamic pricing, and post-event content licensing represent digital monetisation that didn’t exist before smartphones reached current adoption levels.
Entertainment segment
Pre-digital revenue model
Primary digital addition
New ecosystem layers
Music
Album and single sales
Streaming, social content
Live commerce, fan tokens
Film and TV
Cinema, physical media
Subscription streaming
Recommendation engines, companion content
Sports
Broadcast rights, ticketing
Digital rights, fantasy
Live betting, data analytics
Live events
Box office, sponsorship
Digital ticketing, virtual
Pre-event content, engagement platforms
Gaming
Unit sales
Microtransactions, streaming
Tournament ecosystems, viewer betting
The content layer that makes everything stickier
There is a category of digital product that doesn’t create entertainment but deepens engagement with it. Sports analytics apps, artist fan platforms, awards prediction communities, concert review aggregators – products serving audiences who want more than passive consumption. Deeply engaged fans are significantly more valuable than casual ones, not just because they spend more, but because they generate the word-of-mouth that brings new audiences in.
This has real economic consequences for creators. A film generating passionate online discourse before release outperforms one that arrives quietly regardless of budget. An artist with an active fan community sustains touring revenue that streaming income alone would never support. A sports property that serves analysis, betting options, fantasy tools, and social community is a stickier product than one showing up only on match day.
The data dimension underpins all of this. Every interaction generates information about what an audience values, when they engage, and what loses them. Organisations with genuine data capability – not just collection but application – are making decisions about content investment and platform design that less data-literate competitors cannot match.
What gets harder as ecosystems get bigger
The expansion of digital entertainment ecosystems creates management challenges easy to underestimate from the outside. Rights management across multiple platforms and territories is genuinely complex. Consumer data privacy requirements vary by jurisdiction and are tightening across most major markets. The relationship between platform and creator has become increasingly fraught as digital intermediaries take larger shares of revenue that once flowed more directly to the people making the work.
None of these problems are fatal to the broader direction. Entertainment is not going to become less digital. But the organisations navigating this space most successfully treat infrastructure questions – technology, compliance, data, rights – with the same seriousness they bring to creative ones. The click is just as important as the concert. The infrastructure that makes the click possible deserves the same care as the stage.
Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment or other purposes.
Little Steven’s Underground Garage, the world’s only 24/7 rock and roll radio format dedicated to the coolest music ever made, announces the launch of a brand new weekly program: ‘Robbo At The Movies’, championing music and movies together, hosted by Robert Cotto of Renegade Nation and Wicked Cool Records. ‘Robbo At The Movies’ celebrates the long love affair between rock and roll and cinema, a relationship that has shaped generations of soundtracks, scenes, and cultural moments. Each week, Rob will explore a different theme: a classic film, a legendary director, an unforgettable actor, or even a television series known for its iconic needle drops.
Cotto shares, “Film and music have always shared a deep connection. After guest hosting an episode of The Underground Garage to promote ‘Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple’, the documentary that I produced, I was blown away when Stevie offered me this opportunity to develop a show about two of my greatest passions: cinema and rock and roll. Being part of telling Stevie’s story was one dream come true. Getting to join The Underground Garage in this capacity is another, something I’ve fantasized about since the show first hit the airwaves more than twenty years ago.” Van Zandt adds, “We’ve been searching for the perfect guy to do a movie show and we finally found him. We’ve been celebrating cool films in my short vocal breaks all along, but now there will be an entire weekly show dedicated to them. I can’t wait.” Each episode dives into how rock and roll has elevated film and television storytelling, from the rebellious energy of the ’50s and the anthemic sounds of the ’70s to today’s most impactful cultural touchstones. Robert Cotto is a Grammy-nominated filmmaker, producer, writer, and longtime member of the Renegade Nation and Wicked Cool Records family who co-produced the documentary ‘Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple’, which was nominated for Best Music Film at The 67th Annual Grammy Awards.
Music legend Paul Anka shares his new track “Let Me Try Again”, the second preview from his forthcoming studio album ‘INSPIRATIONS OF LIFE AND LOVE’, out February 13 on Green Hill Music and Sun Label Group. Written by Anka, Sammy Cahn, Michel Jourdan and Caravelli, “Let Me Try Again” was first released in 1973 as a recording by his friend and mentor Frank Sinatra, and later by Anka himself in 1989 on his album ‘SOMEBODY LOVES YOU’. The only artist in history to have a song in the Billboard Top 100 during seven consecutive decades, Paul Anka cemented his legacy as one of the greatest songwriters of all time early in his career but continues to write, record and tour.
‘INSPIRATIONS OF LIFE AND LOVE’ arrives just ahead of Valentine’s Day and features Anka’s unmatched songwriting in a lushly orchestrated album available physically in both vinyl and CD as well as digitally via Dolby Atmos. Anka famously wrote hits for iconic artists including Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, Fifth Dimension, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Donna Fargo, Barbara Streisand, Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, Michael McDonald and Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Sammy Davis Jr., Andy Williams, Drake, and Buddy Holly. The new album was recorded mainly in Anka’s home studio in California, with symphony orchestra accompaniment recorded in Budapest. The release comes following Anka’s highly acclaimed documentary film ‘Paul Anka: His Way’, which premiered at last year’s TIFF to great reception. Anka will be honored in December by the Los Angeles Press Club with their 2025 Legend Award which honors an individual within the entertainment industry for their venerable contributions to the industry and to society.
Emerging artist Jenna Raine returns with her immensely relatable new single “Just 15”, out now via Warner Records. With an open heart and generous spirit, the sweeping Americana song is all about forgiving ourselves and each other for the choices we made when we were young and figuring it out. The track opens with spare guitar and quiet intimacy as Jenna sings about visiting her childhood house on Christmas break, making insecurities come out. As the instrumentation opens up to include sprawling pedal steel, twinkling banjo, and a powerful rhythm section, she leads listeners into the light with healing words about giving yourself grace.
Jenna shares, “Just 15 is about me going home to Texas and being reminded of all the mistakes and insecurities I had growing up. I think back on the times I hurt friends, argued with my parents, and tried too hard to fit in, and I still feel some of that guilt. But writing this song was my way of forgiving my younger self and remembering that I wasn’t mean, I was just 15 and still figuring life out.”
