If at the end of the year we all pay attention to roundups like Apple Music Replay 2025, with the new year come forward-looking predictions. In this space, Shazam returns with Fast Forward, which identifies the artists we’ll see break through over the coming months. Thanks to the combination of the service’s predictive data and Apple Music’s editorial expertise, this initiative is one of the most reliable for forecasting the next big names in music. This year’s edition spans 20 genres and 22 countries, and invites us to explore a musical landscape that will be full of surprises.
Looking back at the results of the 2025 edition, it’s clear that Shazam’s selection has a real impact. Last year, the artists featured in Fast Forward saw a 67% year-on-year increase in Shazam discoveries and a 70% rise in radio airplay. With that track record, this 2026 list promises to be packed with future stars.
The artists who will define 2026 according to Shazam
The new Fast Forward class brings together a mix of voices, styles, and backgrounds that lets us travel the world through music. Among the artists leading the selection, we find the following:
- Alessi Rose (United Kingdom): After turning heads in 2024 with rumination as ritual, she returned with the EP Voyeur and her single “First Original Thought”, which reached No. 22 on Shazam’s UK charts.
- Liim (New York): The Brooklyn rapper, with roots in Harlem, broke through with his debut album Liim Lasalle Loves You and the single “For the Both of Us”. In 2025 he saw notable growth, with his biggest day landing in June thanks to the track “Older Than Me”.
- Florence Road (Ireland): This indie-pop quartet went from local success in 2022 to becoming a global phenomenon in 2025, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia as the main countries for discovery on Shazam.
- Kashus Culpepper (Alabama, USA): His song “Sexbomb”, featured on the soundtrack for The Wrong Paris, took the singer-songwriter into Shazam’s US country chart for the first time, reaching No. 69.
- Kidd Carder (Nigeria): His single “Calculate” hit No. 2 on Nigeria’s chart, spent over a month in the Top 10, and made Shazam’s global Top 200 in June.
- CORTIS (Seoul, Korea): The boy band debuted in August and has been on a meteoric rise ever since, reaching No. 1 in South Korea and placing two songs in the global K-Pop Top 10.
- Clarent (Puerto Rico): After his success across Latin America, in 2025 he reached No. 41 on Shazam’s Latin chart with “Scatpack” and entered Spain’s Top 10 with his single “LOVE”.
As we can see, cultural diversity is once again one of the programme’s pillars. In the full list, available on Apple Music, we find talent from countries as different as Norway, India, and Cuba, and genres ranging from French pop and afrobeats to Mexican music. With it, Fast Forward invites us to discover new artists and keeps us up to date with a global music scene that’s evolving faster than ever.
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