ARTIST & MANAGER AWARDS ANNOUNCED

Arlo Parks (pictured), Ali Raymond and Michael Adex are among the winners of the Artist & Manager Awards, the ceremony for which is being reinvented as a film this year.

The awards are organized by the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) and Music Managers Forum (MMF). The awards-ceremony documentary will premiere at 7pm GMT on 2/24 via YouTube.

Parks and her manager, Raymond of Beatnik Creative, have been named Breakthrough Artist & Manager. Since being named in the BBC Sound Of... poll in January 2020 and winning BBC Introducing Artist of the Year, Parks has released a succession of critically acclaimed singles and last week charted at #3 in the U.K. with her debut, Collapsed in Sunbeams.

Adex and his team at Northern Quarterz (NQ) will pick up the Entrepreneur Award in recognition of the creative community they are building in Manchester and their success with rapper Aitch, who has two Top 10 EPs and a string of high-charting singles.

Livestream business Driift, founded by Ric Salmon and Brian Message of ATC Management, will receive the Innovation Award for their series of ticketed online events, which have sold more than 400,000 tickets globally for artists such as Niall Horan, Biffy Clyro, Nick Cave, Laura Marling, Andrea Bocelli and Kylie Minogue.

Finally, Michael Kiwanuka and Starwood Management (Robert Swerdlow, Dave Nicoll and Mark Nicholson) will be presented with the Leading Artist & Manager Award thanks to the release of Grammy-nominee Kiwanuka’s third album, the Mercury Prize-winning KIWANUKA, which hit #2 last year.

All will be featured in the doc alongside Skin of Skunk Anansie and Leigh Johnson (LJM), the previously announced winners of the Pioneer Artist & Manager Award.