Over the past 16 years, Jaybird Communications has been lucky enough to work with some of the best journalists covering the music business. These reporters are the ones writing the history of our industry, telling the story of its evolution, and charting its future. Now, we want to turn the tables and give them a place to tell their own stories. And there’s no one better to kick things off than Music Ally’s Stuart Dredge!
Stuart joined Music Ally as an Editor in 2007, where he started writing the daily Music Ally Bulletin newsletter and still does to this day. In 2021, he became their Head of Insight, a perfect title for someone who has a remarkable ability to see the big picture in any music-biz development.
All the while, he’s maintained a healthy freelance career and also served as a Contributing Editor for The Guardian from 2012-2016. He writes a weekly apps, games, and tech page for children’s magazine The Week Junior, and works on the daily magazine teams at the Cannes Lions and MIPCOM conferences.
So what’s Stuart’s take on today’s music business and where it’s going? How did he get to his current position as one of the music business’s top chroniclers? And what risqué Donald Trump-related article once brought him viral fame? Let’s find out as we pass him the mic!
When did you first realize that you wanted to become a journalist?
The media made me do it! Two TV shows in the U.K. when I was a kid had an impact. Newsround was a daily news show for children that had a “Press Pack” initiative to get them interested in journalism – it’s still going today. And Press Gang was a drama about a group of young people making a newspaper that was definitely formative for me.
Plus I was an avid magazines reader, particularly music. Smash Hits when I was younger (the greatest music magazine of all time!) and then NME/Melody Maker when I was into my mid-teens. The idea of writing for a living – and writing about music in particular – firmly stuck then, and when I went to university, I threw myself into the student newspaper as a result.
What is it about the business of music that made you want to write about it?
It’s just so fascinating. Regular waves of disruption; lots of technology trends; plenty of arguments… But also, music has been so important to me right from those early days reading Smash Hits.
It helped me find my tribe as an awkward 18-year-old, and it’s core to my life now (even if I’m in the middle-aged parent phase where all the bands I grew up with are now heritage acts reuniting for 30th-anniversary album tours).
So music is important to me, and musicians are important to me – and what’s even more a motivating factor as I get older is to be able to write about the positive side of things: how people and startups are helping artists cut through and build sustainable careers.
How did you make your way to Music Ally?
It happened slowly and kinda haphazardly. In the days of Napster/filesharing and then iTunes/iPods, I was a consumer-technology journalist, writing about these trends from the point of view of listeners. Then a few years later, I was working as a mobile-industry journalist – mainly games but also touching on ringtones and music downloads. So I was around the edges of the music business from a tech angle.
I was working at a company called Informa with Steve Mayall, who co-founded Music Ally with Paul Brindley in 2002. After he left to do Music Ally full-time, they offered me some freelance pieces, and it developed from there. I ended up writing the morning news bulletin – and here I am still doing it now!
In your opinion, what are the most interesting things happening in the music business right now?
The obvious thing to say is AI. We stumbled on it more than a decade ago when a startup called Jukedeck won a pitching contest at a tech conference. I was fascinated by the idea of AI music so added it to our coverage beat. It felt like a weird niche topic for quite a while, but here we are in 2025, and it’s the big story.
The arguments about regulation and copyright are interesting and important, of course. But I’m also trying to be optimistic that they will be resolved, and then we can figure out what GenAI music is *really* about.
Other interesting things? Artists and advocacy / activism feels like an important topic at the moment, from speaking out about Gaza, ICE raids, or the climate emergency to having a stronger voice in how the streaming economy and AI evolve. Artists’ voices are louder than ever at the moment, and it’s been rewarding to be able to cover that.
Plus I’m glad that the initial wave of “superfans” hype (which often seemed to boil down to “Brilliant! We can sell them ALL THE STUFF and rinse their wallets!”) is becoming something more interesting and less exploitative in intent. Deeper thought into how to build and nurture fan communities is something I’m enjoying writing about.
Which current trends do you think have the best chance of standing the test of time?
AI isn’t going away. Perhaps in a decade’s time it will have melted into the fabric of how the music industry works (and how humans make music), but honestly I think even the guru-est of AI gurus will struggle to say exactly what that will look like.
Similar for superfans. I think more artists will be building stronger fan communities around them in the future, and that’s going to be helping more of those artists sustain themselves outside streaming.
Any predictions for future trends in the music business over the next five years?
I think (well, hope) that the climate emergency will become a higher priority. There’s a lot of good work being done already by climate-hope organisations and engaged artists, and some blueprints emerging for how to make all kinds of aspects of the industry more sustainable in that regard. So the next five years could see some things that are pilots now becoming standard practice, and all kinds of other inventive pilots emerging to fuel the next wave.
I also think we’re probably not done with platform disruption. It can feel like the big streaming services are too big to be disrupted now, and similar for the big social services. But it still seems unlikely that there isn’t at least one huge, disruptive new platform in the wings to do what TikTok did and shake things up – even if it’s just a glint in some founders’ eyes right now.
Finally, it’s going to be a really exciting five years for music itself. Take what’s happened with Reggaeton, Afrobeats, and K-Pop so far; look at what might happen with genres and scenes from India, China, and other places next; and then think about young musicians doing what young musicians do best: smooshing together all those influences and inspirations into new things. Not commercially-motivated collaborations or clunky mash-ups – we’ll have plenty of both too, inevitably – but more organic new movements and sounds.
Is there one specific thing that PR people can do to significantly increase their chances of catching your eye with their pitches?
Animated GIFs in email subject headings? Thankfully Gmail doesn’t support that yet, as far as I can tell!
My inbox can be a noisy place, I’m constantly battling to stay on top of it and catch everything coming through that might be interesting. Pitch-wise, I think just getting straight to the point about what something is and why it’s interesting. Notes relating it back to something we’ve covered recently (“I saw you wrote about X…”) can help to quickly understand its relevance.
And knowing Music Ally as a publication: we love covering new startups, and we’re covering the various trends I’ve talked about. Some things we don’t do so much: appointments / job moves stories and new album / tour announcements aren’t really our beat. That said, music marketing campaigns are a core area for us, so when there’s an angle on that from a new release, it pings our radar.
What are some things PR people do that drive you up the wall?
I promise I’m not trying to curry favour here, but I’d be willing to bet that 99% of any things that bother me are “things that clients make PR people do,” and the PR people are as annoyed as me about them! Often I can tell there’s a pushy client making unreasonable demands to change a story after it’s been published, for example, for reasons that aren’t about any factual inaccuracy.
Sometimes you encounter people who are over-pushy or even rude, but that works the other way too (I’ve known some journalists who were awful to PR people with no justification!). The vast majority of people I encounter – and especially the ones who pitch to Music Ally regularly – are great to deal with.
What do you think is the best thing you’ve ever written?
Honestly, no idea! The most popular thing I’ve ever written was in my Guardian days: a story about an artist making a Donald Trump-replica 3D-printed butt-plug. It was the biggest story on the entire site for most of a day. I’m not sure I’ll be boasting about that to any grandchildren in the future though…
I have a draft book about the history of Spotify sitting in my cloud drive. I wrote it, got cold feet about it being any good, then opened it again recently and liked it more. If I ever get time to edit and update it, maybe that will be the best thing. But then, every journalist has a best-thing-they’ve-ever-written book on the go. You only get to boast about it if you actually finish it…
When you’re at conferences or other events, do you prefer to talk about music itself, the music industry, or something else entirely?
Inevitably conversations about the industry ensue, but I’m as happy talking about music or completely different things. It’s always good meeting new people who want to tell me about their startup or marketing campaign or something else. As a journalist, those in-person conversations can be key to getting original stories.
What’s your music “hot take”?
Making AI music is fun. We held an internal “Music Ally AI Song Contest” a while back, as a deliberate attempt to get the whole team to try out some of these GenAI tools. Writing lyrics, tweaking prompts to get the AI to do what I wanted, iterating and iterating and eventually having something that sounded… good. It was genuinely fun and felt like a creative process.
I want these tools to be properly licensed so that professional artists and songwriters are benefiting if their work has been used for training. But if we can sort that out, I think there is some fascinating potential in putting these tools into people’s hands that (I hope) complements the existing industry, rather than destroying musicians’ livelihoods.
What’s your favorite song/album of the year? What makes it stand out for you?
Every year I have a “songs I love this year” playlist on the go, and looking at my 2025 one so far it’s almost evenly divided between dance bangers and chilled-out balms. I guess that’s a reaction to the times!
In the latter camp, Hannah Cohen’s “Dusty,” De Clair’s “The Man,” and Yoshika Coldwell’s “In Bloom” are three songs from artists I discovered this year that I absolutely love. And as for bangers, Cerrone and Christine and the Queens’ “Catching Feelings” and Katy B’s “Avalanche” are both great!
What is a song/album you love that people might not expect you to like? What drew you to it?
There’s an artist called Inji, who is definitely a young TikTok-native artist for young TikTok-native people. But I have loved pretty much all her stuff. She has a marvellous way with lyrics and bouncy basslines.
Lightning Round: Give me one word that sums up your thoughts on the below topics.
- Embargoes – SoManyNow! (Is this cheating?)
- AI – Fascinating
- Social media – Overwhelming
- Press releases – Overload
- Phone pitches – Rare
- The Oxford Comma –
- Meeting for coffee – Rare
- Deadline days – Outdated
- Followup emails – See answers for embargoes and social media