The Starter Pack

What to read if you've never read Fourth Best before

welcome to the post-streaming age

There's a simple idea behind Fourth Best: new Irish music coverage for a post-streaming age. If you're wondering what on earth the post-streaming age even is, I reckon that after the mass layoffs at Spotify in late 2023, any hope that artists had for "breaking through" with streaming coverage completely evaporated. I wrote an article about this idea in a bit more depth over here:

If you're curious about how this changing current affected one of my favourite Irish hip-hop albums of the last decade and left the artist behind it out to dry, have a read of my 2024 Album of the Year piece:

As you can imagine, AI, scams, and the social media race to the bottom is making everything worse for artists on the come-up, feeding on the scraps of what's left of streaming. In what some people reckon is my best piece for the site, I followed one person putting AI music onto streaming platforms who had gotten attention from the likes of RTÉ and Nialler9 all to ask the big questions: how did we get here, where are we going, and most important of all: why?

the outside world

I go to a lot of gigs and festivals and write about why they matter to me. These are the most fun to write, and I feel are the ones that stand out the best by themselves.

drawing the map

One of the best things about Irish music is that I swear that wherever you start from, you can find a community of people behind it, all with their own unique spins and stories on the genre. In some of my pieces, I like to start with individual bits of art that I love and explore the wider world around them.

the future of Irish music traces the future of Ireland

Ireland sits at a crossroads of social and economic pressures; a housing crisis sits beside a far-right that burns down buildings rather than see them shelter a foreigner. In some of my pieces, I like to look at music that reimagines what Ireland can be, offering some much needed hope in the darkness.