Touring was supposed to be the music industry's financial saviour, but now even gigs are losing their allure. So can packing fans on to a cruise liner pay dividends? Gillian Orr finds out

'Poshstock' – the festival offering spa treatments, songbirds and Status Quo

These are tough enough times for earnest young men with guitars. Ruarri Joseph appears to have it all: decent looks, a worldly backstory, a warm tenor and songs that seem to tick the required boxes.

Make way for the sons of Mumford

The rock festival of Pimms and picnics marks a seventh year

Faroe Islander Teitur Lassen's UK debut The Singer is one of this year's more arresting releases, its mischievous, emotionally revealing songs employing a thrilling mix of memorable images, inventive chamber-pop arrangements, and deceptive lyrical strategies – most notably the unreliable narrator whose observations suddenly turn in upon themselves to illuminate the singer's own situation.

Old wobbly-head is back with his songwriting as strong in places as it was circa White Ladder, the album that brought him to the attention of those living outside Ireland (where WL is still the biggest selling record of all time).

It's taken David Gray four years to follow up Life in Slow Motion, and frankly, you have to wonder what's been holding him up, as these 11 pleasant, predictable songs represent no great development or deviation from the course of his previous work.

My parents ... moved from Manchester to Solva, a fishing village in Pembrokeshire, where they started a company called Cottage Clothes. It was the 1970s, so everything was a quilted Liberty fabric.

Musicians including Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, Billy Bragg, Blur's David Rowntree and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien said last night that the public should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the internet.

The army of sensitive, multi-million-selling souls who Snow Patrol are lumped in with show no signs of slowing down.

Grown-up ravers feel the sunshine in Malvern Hills

Visitors to Ben Turnbull's new exhibition should prepare themselves for not only a visual assault but an aural one too.

You could call it the herd instinct. Following the success of David Gray and Dido, the British music industry sucked up singer-songwriters of both sexes and we ended up with James Blunt and Katie Melua. The Lily Allen phenomenon then gave rise to Kate Nash and her ilk. And with Amy Winehouse's confessional soul selling millions, everyone has been scouring the British Isles for young women of the blue-eyed soul persuasion.