The Guardian have revealed the first ever Guardian Music Power 100 – the 100 most influential people in British rock and pop (according to them)- Topping the list is multi platinum selling MOR soulstress Adele(and her team), the announcement of her ‘power list win’ is somewhat fitting given that only yesterday despite her hideously bloated success she got in hot water for her attempts to avoid the good old British Tax man.
So who is in this list? Well, the team behind Adele – including Adele herself – top the poll, which does sort of smack of “oh, we better include some artists, whose the biggest at the moment?”, which the paper sort of admits itself when it confesses “our panel [of industry experts] stressed most forcefully teamwork and the artist – ‘none of us would be here without the artists’, they said – hence the choice of No 1, an artist served by a top-rate team.
Elsewhere its dominated by the usual suspects, the top BBC radio types, the major label chiefs, the live music supremos, the retail bosses, the techies who control digital music or artists’ social media activity, a few managers, a couple of producers and songwriters, at least one lawyer, and more artists ensuring most strands of the rock and pop genres are represented. But no critics, as the Guardian presumably doesn’t want to appear nepotistic if it ‘picked its own’ or wish to run the risk of attacks from other publications or writer’s who weren’t included.
Anyway here’s the top ten, but for somewhat random the full list go check The Guardian website here.
1. Team Adele
2. Lucian Grainge and David Joseph, Universal Music
3. Simon Cowell
4. Nigel Harding, Radio 1
5. Person or persons unknown, iTunes UK
6. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube
7. George Ergoutadis, Radio 1
8. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, Google
9. Simon Moran, SJM promotions
10. Jeff Bezos, Amazon
