“It was too dark, too personal, too risky, not commercial. It wasn’t pop until it was on the radio”: How Lana Del Rey’s breakthrough hit transformed the contemporary pop landscape

Lana Del Rey.

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

At a time when the music industry generates $28.6 billion in global revenue a year, it’s easy to forget that 20 years ago, major labels faced an existential crisis as they battled the spectre of ‘free’ P2P filesharing and scrabbled to work out how they were going to make a profit from recorded music ever again.