Gramophone

About Gramophone

Songlines is a British magazine devoted to world music, published from London by the Mark Allen Group. Launched in 1999, it is the United Kingdom's leading title covering traditional, popular, contemporary and fusion music from around the globe, featuring artists from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everything in between. Published ten times a year, each issue combines album reviews, artist interviews, guides to particular musical traditions, concert and festival listings, and travel stories, alongside a compilation CD known as "Top of the World". Its founding editor was Simon Broughton, co-editor of The Rough Guide to World Music, and its name was chosen from the Aboriginal Australian mythological concept of songlines — invisible pathways across the land recorded in song. Today the magazine is edited by Russ Slater Johnson from the Mark Allen Group's offices at St Jude's Church in Herne Hill, south London, and its official website is songlines.co.uk.

History and origins

Songlines was launched in 1999 by editor-in-chief Simon Broughton and publisher Paul Geoghegan. Unusually for a British music magazine, it began life as an offshoot of Gramophone, the venerable classical music monthly, which had decided that world music — then a fast-growing sector of the record business in the wake of phenomena such as Buena Vista Social Club — deserved dedicated coverage. Broughton, who had co-edited The Rough Guide to World Music, was the ideal founding editor, bringing both scholarly depth and journalistic credibility to the new venture. The magazine's first offices were in Effra Road in south London, not far from where it would eventually be based under later ownership. From the start, Songlines set out to look at the world through its music, treating traditions from Mali to Mexico and from India to Iraq with equal seriousness. The choice of name was deliberate and poetic: in Aboriginal Australian mythology, songlines are ancestral tracks across the landscape, encoded in song and story, and the magazine adopted the idea as a metaphor for music as a map of human culture. In the years after its launch, Songlines established itself quickly as the definitive English-language voice of the world music scene, building relationships with labels such as Glitterbeat, Sahel Sounds, Daptone Records and Hudson Records that continue to this day.

Ownership and publishing

In February 2015 the Mark Allen Group acquired Songlines, bringing it together with the group's other music titles. The acquisition completed a trio of celebrated music magazines in the Mark Allen stable: Gramophone, the classical authority founded by Compton Mackenzie in 1923; Jazzwise, the country's foremost jazz magazine, launched in 1997; and Songlines, covering world music. Mark Allen, the group's chairman, described Songlines as a wonderful magazine and the only one of its kind highlighting indigenous roots music from different parts of the globe, saying it added immensely to the group's music stable and gave it additional clout in the music industry. As the trade press noted at the time, the deal brought the magazine full circle, since Songlines had begun life as an offshoot of Gramophone before Gramophone itself moved from Haymarket to the Mark Allen Group in 2013. All full-time staff, including Simon Broughton, transferred with the sale, and the magazine moved to the group's offices at St Jude's Church in Herne Hill, barely a stone's throw from its old Effra Road premises. The Mark Allen Group is a family-owned independent company publishing more than sixty magazines across healthcare, education, business-to-business, leisure, manufacturing and engineering, as well as running a dedicated tour company and conferences and exhibitions.

Editorial leadership

The founding editor, Simon Broughton, led Songlines from its launch in 1999 through the acquisition by the Mark Allen Group, shaping its voice over more than a decade and a half. A co-editor of The Rough Guide to World Music, Broughton gave the magazine an authoritative yet accessible tone, commissioning experts who knew their traditions from the inside while writing for a general readership. He was succeeded as editor by Russ Slater Johnson, who now leads the title. The editorial team works from the Mark Allen Group's south London headquarters, drawing on a network of contributing writers around the world. Contributors past and present have included specialists in African, Asian, Latin American and European folk musics, reflecting the magazine's commitment to genuine expertise. The magazine's licensing materials describe it as edited with reviews, interviews and guides to world music traditions, emphasising that its content is written by people who live and breathe the music they cover. This depth of knowledge is one of the reasons the title has remained the definitive magazine for world music through more than two and a half decades of publication.

The Top of the World CD

One of Songlines' most distinctive features is the compilation CD that accompanies every issue. Known as the "Top of the World" CD, it typically presents ten tracks drawn from the best new album releases reviewed in that issue, plus a five-track guest playlist curated by a well-known music lover — past guests have included figures such as Damon Albarn, Kate Bush and Robert Plant. For readers, the CD functions as a curated sampler, a way to hear the music discussed in the reviews without hunting down dozens of separate albums. For artists and labels, inclusion on the CD is valuable exposure to an engaged audience of dedicated world-music listeners. The CD has been a signature element of the magazine since its early days, when the licensing materials noted each issue was distributed with a world music sampler CD. Alongside the standard CD, Songlines has at various points offered special samplers, such as a free digital sampler marking its fiftieth issue, which was billed as a collector's edition of fifty great moments in world music. In an era when physical media has declined across most of publishing, the persistence of the covermounted CD underlines how central recorded music remains to the Songlines proposition.

Coverage and regular features

The content of Songlines spans the full breadth of world music, from traditional and popular to contemporary and fusion, and from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Regular ingredients include album reviews — the backbone of any issue — alongside in-depth artist interviews, guides to particular world music traditions, concert and festival listings, and travel stories connected to musical places. The reviews section treats its subject with unusual seriousness, evaluating new releases with the same rigour a classical magazine brings to a new recording of Beethoven. Interviews range from established stars such as Mali's kora virtuosos and India's sarod players to emerging acts from labels like Sahel Sounds and Remote Records. The magazine's "Upfront" news pages carry sections such as "Top of the World" track listings and "The Source", covering news from the global music scene. Festival coverage is a particular strength, reflecting the importance of events like WOMAD to the world music ecosystem. The magazine also looks beyond music itself, touching on the social, political and environmental contexts in which the music is made — an approach evident in recent coverage of subjects such as climate-linked music initiatives and tributes to departed legends.

Songlines Music Awards

Songlines has long run its own awards celebrating excellence in world music. The Songlines Music Awards recognise outstanding albums and artists across categories that reflect the breadth of the magazine's coverage, and winners have traditionally been announced in a dedicated awards issue. The awards give the magazine a convening role within the world music industry, bringing together artists, labels and fans, and they provide a focal point for the year's releases. Like the Top of the World CD, the awards reinforce Songlines' position not just as a commentator on world music but as an active participant in its culture. Coverage of the awards, and of the artists they honour, forms a regular thread through the magazine's editorial calendar, and past awards issues have become collectors' items for readers.

Songlines Digital and online presence

In 2009 Songlines launched Songlines Digital, an online subscription version of the magazine, allowing readers to access the title on screen as well as in print. The magazine's website, songlines.co.uk, carries news, reviews and features, while digital editions are also available through platforms such as Zinio. The move into digital subscriptions came at a time when many specialist magazines were grappling with the shift from print to screen, and Songlines' early adoption helped it retain subscribers beyond the newsstand. The brand's content and tracks are also fully available to licensees, and the magazine's licensing arm promotes Songlines as a magnetic concept that can work in any market. On social media the magazine maintains an active presence, sharing reviews, interviews and news with a global audience of world music enthusiasts.

Songlines Music Travel

In 2008 Songlines expanded beyond publishing to launch Songlines Music Travel, a music tourism service offering excursions to renowned world music locations and festivals. The venture reflected the natural overlap between the magazine's travel writing and its musical coverage: readers who discovered a tradition in the magazine's pages could then experience it first-hand on an organised trip. The service offered journeys to festivals and musical heartlands around the world, guided by the same expertise that informed the magazine's editorial. Songlines Music Travel is now on indefinite hiatus, but its existence illustrates the ambition of the brand at its peak — not merely to write about world music but to build a community of listeners willing to travel the world in search of it.

Circulation and readership

Songlines has a reported circulation of around 20,000 copies, a respectable figure for a specialist music title and a testament to the loyalty of the world music audience. Its readers are typically knowledgeable, engaged listeners who buy records, attend concerts and festivals, and travel — exactly the demographic that advertisers in the travel, audio and cultural sectors value. The magazine's licensing materials describe it as the world's only reliable guide to world music, a claim that speaks to the trust it has built over more than twenty-five years. Because world music is by definition global, the magazine's readership extends well beyond the United Kingdom, with subscribers and digital readers in Europe, North America and beyond. The combination of print, digital and licensed content gives the brand multiple routes to its audience, and its longevity in a challenging market for print media is itself a measure of its success.

Legacy and influence

Over more than a quarter of a century, Songlines has become the definitive English-language magazine for world music, the title to which artists, labels, festivals and fans turn for authoritative coverage. Its influence extends beyond its own pages: by treating musics from every continent with consistent seriousness, it helped legitimise world music as a field of critical writing rather than a marketing category. The magazine's guides to musical traditions have introduced countless readers to sounds they would never otherwise have encountered, from Kurdish singers to Cuban son collectives, from Gaelic lullabies to Malian guitar traditions. Its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2024 was marked with special editorial looking back over the title's history, including features on how the world music landscape had changed since 1999. As part of the Mark Allen Group's music portfolio, alongside Gramophone and Jazzwise, Songlines completes a roster of respected specialist music magazines covering classical, jazz and world music — a unique position in British publishing. For anyone seeking to understand the music of the wider world, Songlines remains, as its own materials put it, the definitive magazine for world music.