It’s been announced that Mark Ronson will pick up the Outstanding Contribution to Music award at the Brits later this month.
The 50-year-old DJ and producer said in a statement that "This is the most meaningful honour of my career. I think of the times I've watched artists I revere accept this same award. The idea that I'm now standing in that lineage feels impossible."
"I left England as a kid, but this country runs through everything I've made. The UK artists I've worked with - their brilliance and refusal to compromise - shaped not just my work but how I understand what music should do. And more than anything, it's the crowds here who've sustained and showed up for me.
"The fans, the festival crowds, the record buyers and streamers - the love has always been overwhelming. I'm beyond grateful for all of it."
Ronson was born in London but raised in New York and has joint citizenship. Over the past quarter century, he’s managed to weave a unique path through music that touches on hip hop, pop, funk and soul.
He started out as a DJ – indeed wrote a memoir about his early days playing in 1990s New York last year – but soon move over into production and has worked with a small army of big names in his time – Amy Winehouse most notably, but also Duran Duran, Bruno Mars, Lily Allen, Lady Gaga, Queens of the Stone Age, Robbie Williams and Adele, to name just a few. He’s also released five albums under his own name, the second of which, Version, went three times platinum in the UK alone.
The Outstanding Contribution award has a long but patchy history at the Brits – it was awarded annually until 2010. Then, in 2014, it morphed into the ‘Icon’ award and has been given intermittently, often to international artists: Pink won it in 2019 and Kylie Minogue in 2024.
Some artists have been awarded it on multiple occasions. Bowie and Robbie Williams have all won it twice and Elton John and Paul McCartney three times – the latter twice with the Beatles and once as a solo artist.
Yet the BPI has, for whatever reason, chosen to snub some artists who, you would think, would be shoe-ins for such an award: UK acts that have sold millions of records all over the world, like Depeche Mode or Iron Maiden. Or Kate Bush, for example.
Anyway, they will all have to wait at least another year. Announcing Mark Ronson’s award in a statement, Stacey Tang, the chair of the 2026 Brit Awards Committee said the producer has "an extraordinary ability to elevate each project he works on… Mark’s creative influence spans every corner of contemporary culture.”
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