On a mild winter’s evening in January 2012, a young Ed Sheeran had just finished a show in Wolverhampton, near Birmingham. Fresh off the unlikely success of The A Team, a song about a sex worker addicted to crack cocaine, all eyes were on the singer-songwriter. In the crowd at the city’s civic hall was 13-year-old Mahalia Burkmar, who had been writing some songs of her own. After the concert she was introduced to Sheeran, who later that night shared her “flipping amazing songs and singing” with his fans.
Atlantic Records “signed me basically two months later, and the rest is kind of f**king history”, Mahalia says now, video-calling from the small flat in east London where she spent the pandemic. “My camera is a little bit dusty. Hold on.”
She was among the youngest artists ever to sign to a label. Twelve years later she has released two studio albums, including, in July, IRL. A regular recipient of rising-star gongs, Mahalia has been developed as a musical act from a young age – and it finally feels as if it’s her moment.
“I was born and bred in Leicester,” she says. “I’m of dual heritage. My mum is of Jamaican descent; my dad is British, Irish and some other stuff ... I’ve never met any of my family in Limerick, but I have been there. I did a show in a tiny pub in Limerick. I stood on stage [and said], ‘My family are from here,’ and everybody went absolutely crazy ... I would love to find out more about my family out there. My dad doesn’t really know our Irish family.
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“There’s something really similar to me about Irish culture and Jamaican culture, which I’m not sure everybody always understands. There was a road where I lived in Birmingham when I was studying about 10 years ago. I lived on this tiny L-shaped road, and literally half of it was Jamaican and half of it was Irish, and everybody was friends. They used to have street parties and stuff like that. And I remember thinking, God, the way these two cultures are coming together is so fun to me.”
Growing up, Mahalia was surrounded by a broad range of music and developed a broad taste. Her mother, Debbion Currie, sang in the 1980s band Colourbox, and her father toured as a singer and guitarist with the synth-pop duo Erasure.
“When I say I listened to everything, I feel like I’m being really boring, but there genuinely was something different coming out of every room ... I constantly had this really eclectic music taste that I don’t think anyone I went to school with ever understood.”
Around the school playground, when songs were a formidable trading currency on the phones of the time, Mahalia stood out. “There was a point when everybody had Ed Sheeran: A Team on their phone; it was that kind of era. When I used to come in with my little iPod Shuffle, listening to Bon Iver, people would be, like, ‘What the f**k is this?’” She would also play Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Lianne La Havas on repeat. “I think I was really obsessed with girls with guitars.”
She started writing songs on guitar and piano when she was 11. Pretty soon her parents took her to open-mic nights, and she “made a f**king killing” busking at weekends. She’d normally make about £50 a day, she says; once, when she was 13, she busked for five hours and brought home £400.
Years later – an entire adolescence later – she finally began to bloom with the release of her first album, Love and Compromise, in 2019. Two songs from it, I Wish I Missed My Ex, and What You Did, which featured Ella Mai, have each racked up more than 100 million streams on Spotify. But the pandemic wasn’t easy for her.
“I think people for a second there thought that I was never going to come back,” says Mahalia. The bar was set high, she admits. And six months after the album was released, the UK locked down. She still sounds regretful about how much was lined up for her in 2020. “That was a real, real ... It wasn’t even a kick in the stomach. It was a knife in the f**king eye.”
As more established acts waited out the storm, emerging acts such as Mahalia, whose rocket felt as if it was just taking off, were firmly grounded. “It was pretty bad actually,” she says, laughing. “It had a huge effect on my mental health. Because it was having such a huge effect on my mind, there was a real domino effect to all of my close relationships ... I kind of freaked out, to be honest.”
Much of IRL is inspired by the “worst break-up” of her life – when the pandemic began, Mahalia’s relationship with her partner “crumbled pretty much immediately”, she says, in part because of the purposelessness she felt. Even though the album has been well received, the singer may not see a huge amount of money from it. Mahalia posted on social media this summer that she had “never made a penny” from her music because of “12 years of debt” she has racked up with her label. Even after the two songs exceeded 100 million streams each on Spotify, she received none of the revenue they generated under a contract she says is “pretty standard practice” in the industry. Why?
When Mahalia signed up with her label, at the age of 13, the company gave her an advance – effectively a loan that she could use to record and promote her music. Under her contract, 80 per cent of the income from those recordings would go the label, with the remaining 20 per cent going to Mahalia – but only once she had repaid her advance; in the meantime, her share would also go to the record company. Given the money involved in studio time and production, not to mention paying for other artists who appear on her songs, as well as covering the bills for her videos, she’s still paying off her debt.
“I signed so f**king young that I didn’t put out a lot of music until I was about 19,” she says. “That’s about six years of studio time, producers ... so money is just adding up ... I would need to have, like, a really f**king mentally big album, maybe, to pay off and start making money.”
Mahalia, who has been nominated for two Brit awards and a Grammy, stresses that her record label has treated her fairly – the point of her social-media post, she says, is to highlight the reality of the music industry and correct any misconceptions about how musicians live.
As her share of recording income is still paying back her advance, Mahalia’s income is generated by live shows and brand partnerships. “I still make money and I’m still able to live. But in the live touring world it’s kind of a double-edged sword. You might make a profit [normally], but if I want to add a drummer [the cost means] you could go back to breaking even.”
There’s a song from 2001 called Everything Is Free, which the American folk singer Gillian Welch wrote in response to feeling her creative independence was being threatened – it was at the time that song-sharing websites such as Napster were emerging. On it she sings: “Everything is free now, that’s what they say. Everything I ever done, gonna give it away. Someone hit the big score. They figured it out: that we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.” It has become what Rolling Stone magazine calls a modern classic in the streaming era.
It’s a song whose lyrics Mahalia can appreciate: although streaming has enabled artists to reach far more listeners than ever before, she says, its financial model is failing them.
The biggest streaming platform is Spotify, which says that it passes about two-thirds of its income to the rights holders – usually the record labels and music publishers – of the tracks its users play each month. When it sends them these royalties, it also gives each label (which usually owns the recording) and publisher (which usually owns the copyright to the song) details of the streams that month’s payments are for. It’s then up to those rights holders to divide the royalties between the artists, songwriters, managers, lawyers, publicists and others involved in the business; the proportion each receives depends on their arrangement with the label or publishing company.
Streaming is certainly big business: Spotify says that it has now paid more than $40 billion in royalties and that, last year, more than 10,000 of the 200,000 or so artists on the platform generated at least $100,000 each from it; 1,060 of them generated at least $1 million each. But that’s how much money the artists’ music generated as a whole, not how much the artists received from their record labels in return for their streams.
In practice, according to informed estimates, Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream – which is to say $1 or so for each 250 plays. (In 2021, Apple Music said it paid about double that.) But the royalties that an artist’s streams generate each month can be heavily affected by music-listening trends. Imagine you’re a singer whose tracks are played a million times a week. That might normally entitle you to a healthy share of Spotify’s income each month. But if a global star such as Taylor Swift, Drake or Bad Bunny releases new music in a particular month, it’s likely be streamed so many times a week that your million plays will end up representing a much smaller proportion of what people are listening to on Spotify, with the result that your music temporarily generates much lower royalties.
This is effectively all academic for Mahalia for as long as her share of streaming income goes to repay her advance. Mahalia’s pair of songs with more than 100 million streams on Spotify may have generated $400,000 each in royalties; her entitlement to 20 per cent of that means the two tracks might have paid off a total of $160,000 of the money she owes Atlantic Records.
“If you go on to Google, it says my net worth is over £1 million. I mean, I’m still renting my tiny two-bed flat in east London, and I’m sh**ting myself that the rent’s going to go up.”
Mahalia hasn’t forgotten how she got her first break: on our call she says she’d like to meet a young fan the way Ed Sheeran met her in 2012. Perhaps, in lowering the ladder, she’ll restart the cycle that began at Wolverhampton Civic Hall all those years ago.
Mahalia is at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday, October 13th, and at Mandela Hall, Belfast, on Saturday, October 14th
