EQ Music Named One of the World’s Top Pop Music Blogs by Feedspot
Well, this is rather nice.
Yes. Number twelve.
That puts our little independent pop music operation alongside some fairly enormous company. Feedspot’s 2026 ranking has Billboard at #4, Pitchfork at #5 and The FADER at #6, with EQ Music landing at #12 — ahead of plenty of established international music publications.
For a blog that is still, for the most part, run by two people — Rajan Rudolph and Mandy Rogers — because we genuinely love discovering and championing great pop music, we’re incredibly proud of that.
Feedspot describes its annual list as a ranking of the most active, influential and valuable pop music blogs on the internet, taking into consideration factors including content relevance, subject expertise, posting frequency, freshness and credibility.
And consistency is probably the word that means the most to us.
Nearly two decades of believing in pop music
The roots of EQ Music stretch back to 2005, when Rajan launched the site originally known as Electroqueer.com, with Mandy joining as New Artists Editor in 2007 and helping transform it into the multi-writer music blog that became EQ Music. Since then, we’ve kept publishing. Week after week. Year after year.
Through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, streaming, algorithms and whatever the internet decides to throw at us next, the basic idea behind EQ has never really changed:
Find exciting pop music. Write about it. Give talented people a platform.
We’ve interviewed hundreds of artists over the years, from emerging musicians giving some of their first interviews to names including Lady Gaga, Sia, Adam Lambert and MIKA, alongside countless independent artists who we believed deserved considerably more attention than they were receiving elsewhere.
And although our tastes have always wandered happily around pop, electronic and alternative music, supporting LGBTQ+ artists and the wider queer music community has remained fundamental to what EQ Music is about.
There are plenty of places online where you can read about the biggest song in the world.
We’ve always been rather more interested in telling you about the artist who might make the biggest song in the world next.
From webpage to stage
One of the things we’re proudest of is that EQ Music has never really been content to exist only on a screen.
Very early on, we started taking the artists we were writing about online and putting them in front of real audiences. That became EQ Music Live, and over the years it has grown into something much bigger than a traditional blog showcase.
For us, live events have always been a natural extension of the editorial side of EQ. If we discover an artist we truly believe in, why stop at writing about them?
In more recent years, we’ve had the pleasure of working on shows and events with artists including JORDY, Zee Machine, Bentley Robles, Dragonette, Betty Who, Bright Light Bright Light and Tom Goss — artists who represent exactly the kind of exciting, independent and LGBTQ+ pop music that has always been at the heart of EQ.
We’ve also expanded into producing drag events, working with RuPaul’s Drag Race queens Crystal Envy and Lana Ja’Rae to bring fun, music-led drag shows to London audiences.
And that’s really what EQ Music Live has become.
It isn’t simply about booking a venue and putting on a gig. It’s about giving artists another platform, creating welcoming spaces for queer performers and audiences, and turning the community we’ve built online into something people can experience together in a room.
Most recently, we’ve continued developing our live presence in Camden while also producing an official showcase during SXSW London.
Nearly two decades after we first started writing about emerging artists, there’s still something incredibly satisfying about watching somebody we’ve supported online walk onto an EQ stage and connect with an audience in real life.
For us, supporting an artist has always meant more than clicking publish.
The written word still matters
Over the years, EQ Music and its editorial voice have popped up in places we never really expected when we started writing about electropop on the internet.
Our work has been featured or referenced by publications including Music Week, and EQ’s commentary has appeared in or been cited by national UK media including The Guardian, Metro and Daily Star. Rajan was also selected by BBC News as an influential UK-based music editor and BBC Sound Of pundit for five consecutive years.
We’ve seen EQ mentioned around major music events, in industry publications and even in Billboard — which makes appearing only eight places behind Billboard on Feedspot’s pop music ranking particularly satisfying.
But this recognition also means something bigger to us because of what has happened to independent music journalism.
Every few years someone announces that blogging is dead.
Apparently nobody reads anymore. Everything needs to be a ten-second video. Music discovery belongs exclusively to algorithms. Reviews don’t matter. Interviews are content. Journalism is content. Everything is content.
We don’t really subscribe to that.
We still believe in the power of the written word.
We believe there is value in someone actually listening to a record, thinking about it and explaining why it deserves your attention.
We believe an interview can reveal something about an artist that a social media clip never will.
And we believe independent voices remain incredibly important in a music industry increasingly driven by platforms, playlists, metrics and algorithms.
Perhaps that’s why, after all these years, we’re still here.
Still independent. Still discovering.
There isn’t a giant editorial department sitting behind EQ Music.
Most days it’s still Rajan and Mandy, listening, watching, writing, debating what deserves coverage and getting excited when we stumble across something brilliant.
We’ve done it consistently since Mandy joined the blog in 2007, not because somebody told us that blogging was a particularly sensible business model, but because we love independent pop music and we love helping good artists find an audience.
So being recognised by Feedspot as the #12 Pop Music Blog in the world for 2026, sitting amongst publications of the scale and history of Billboard, Pitchfork and The FADER, feels like a rather wonderful acknowledgement of all those years of work.
To every artist who has trusted us with their music, every publicist who has sent us something genuinely brilliant, every performer who has stepped onto an EQ stage, every writer who has contributed over the years and – most importantly – everybody who has ever clicked onto EQ Music to discover something new:
thank you.
We’re proud of what we’ve built.
And we’re definitely not finished yet.
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