Olivia Dean, Apple Music
Apple Music revealed its Artist of the Year for 2026 on November 9: British singer Olivia Dean, who becomes the first UK artist to receive the honour since the award began. She succeeds American rapper Tyler, The Creator, joining a list of past winners that includes Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and The Weeknd. The trophy itself, a machined aluminium block housing a silicon wafer between two sheets of glass, caps off a year nobody quite saw coming at this scale.
A chart record that stood since 1953 finally falls
The signature moment of her year is a song: “Rein Me In,” her duet with fellow Brit Sam Fender. The track spent 23 non-consecutive weeks at Number 1 on the UK’s Official Singles Chart, breaking a record held since 1953 by Frankie Laine’s “I Believe.” It was also crowned the UK’s Official Song of the Summer 2026, racking up 69 million combined streams between June and August. Her other single, “Man I Need,” held its own too: reaching Number 2 over the summer, it made her the first artist to hold the top two summer spots since Sabrina Carpenter in 2024. By the end of September it was still the UK’s biggest song of the year so far, with over 173 million combined streams, ahead of “Rein Me In” itself in second place with 167 million.
From supporting Sabrina Carpenter to a sold-out run at The O2
A little over a year ago, Olivia Dean was still opening for Sabrina Carpenter at New York’s Madison Square Garden. In 2026, she returned there as the headliner for a four-night residency, before closing out her world tour with six sold-out shows at London’s O2 Arena. The arc says a lot: an artist still filed under “rising UK talent” two years ago is now filling some of the biggest rooms on the planet.
“The Art of Loving”: the record that started it all
It all traces back to her second album, The Art of Loving, released in September 2025 and Number 1 in the UK for eight weeks. By the end of September 2026 it was still the country’s second-biggest album of the year. Apple Music’s own editors describe a sound steeped in 1960s soul and pop, with Sade, Prince and Lauryn Hill as acknowledged touchstones. The record treats love as a conscious effort rather than a simple feeling, an idea drawn from scholar bell hooks’ book All About Love. “So Easy (To Fall In Love),” sixth in the UK’s year-end singles tally, and “Nice To Each Other,” twelfth, prove the album has legs well beyond a single breakout track.
A Grammy, four Brit Awards, and a line that sums it up
2026 also brought the expected hardware: a Grammy for Best New Artist, then four Brit Awards, including Artist of the Year. For Apple Music co-head Rachel Newman, the pick came down to craft rather than numbers: “What sets Olivia apart is that she speaks from the heart, every time.” Dean herself kept it simple, tracing the win back to why she does this in the first place: “I love making music. It’s the best thing in the world.”
Whether Olivia Dean can match this in 2027 is an open question. After a Grammy, a clean sweep of Brit Awards and a chart record that had stood since the postwar years, the bar is already high. But the real story of this year is simpler: it took barely two years for a British soul-pop singer to go from opening slots to becoming the genre’s global reference point.
