Ed Sheeran at No 1 was not the biggest problem with 1Xtra's power list

No wonder 1Xtra presenter Twin B felt moved to calm the pitchfork-wielding virtual mob that has been descending on the BBC's digital radio station over the few days "NO ONE here called Ed Sheeran the most influential music in black & urban music," he tweeted. "Calm down and put the banners down please."

He was responding to the wave of outrage that greeted 1Xtra's "Power List", published on Friday, which featured Ed Sheeran at No 1, Disclosure at No 2 and Sam Smith at No 4 – outrage caused by the fact that those artists are distinctly white, and people perceived this as a list of the most influential people in black music. Wiley, never short of an opinion, was particularly exercised on Twitter by the list and opened with this on Saturday:

Following it with this …

He followed those up on Monday …

And continued to tweet:

Twin B's point was that Wiley and the other critics have misunderstood the list, that it's not the most influential people in black music. So where did they get that idea? Perhaps from 1Xtra's presentation of the list, which opens: "This is the Top 20 Most Important UK Artists In The Scene from the last 12 months."

You might very argue that the phrasing of that sentence is so vague, having apparently been written by a 12-year-old with a Fondness For Capitalising Everything, that to take it as meaning "most influential in black music" is a bit of a leap.

But given that 1Xtra describes itself as a "new black music network" it seems pretty hard to assume "The Scene" means anything other than the black music scene, rather than "anyone who's had anything to do with hip-hop, R&B or dance music, even if they are not themselves hip-hop, R&B or dance music". As for "influential" – that word "Important" is the key one. When music lovers discuss "importance" they tend not to be discussing business clout, they mean important musically. Influential, for want of a better word.

Even though the 1Xtra list was also introduced with the words "artists were considered on a number of variables such as sales statistics, plus more subjective areas like the quality of music and impact across the wider industry," the damage had already been done.

I have some sympathy with compilers of the 1Xtra power list, having had my own experience of putting one together. There's no exact science to it, or indeed any science. You simply get a bunch of people, preferably ones with some knowledge of the music industry, and you spend a long time arguing about a bunch of names. You forget names; you overvalue some and undervalue others; your list gets subjected to personal prejudices from your panellists, about which you know nothing. And at the end you come up with a list – subjective, incomplete, but perhaps interesting and even informative – that everyone tells you is rubbish. Fair enough: that's their right.

Nevertheless, the 1Xtra list is fatally flawed, because it's confined to artists. While the decline of the recorded music industry has seen a shift in power, it's rarely the case that artists wield more power than the businesspeople. If power within the music industry is defined by the ability to determine what you get to hear (or, perhaps more accurately, what you can't avoid hearing), then it's not the artists who would dominate the upper echelons of the lists. It would still be record company executives, digital music pioneers, radio programmers, artist managers, radio pluggers and so on.

It's very possible the most powerful people in the British black music scene are white; it's just very unlikely they are Ed Sheeran and Disclosure. It's possible, also, that the most powerful actual black person in British black music wouldn't be an artist at all, but Jamal Edwards of SBTV, the very model of someone who saw the gaps left by the old music industry and poured himself into them until he was part of the fabric. Or it might be 1Xtra's Austin Daboh – it certainly wouldn't be the actual No 3, Tinie Tempah.

Artists can be powerful; and black artists can be powerful – it's not something confined to the likes of U2. That's visible more clearly in the US, where the likes of Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Kanye West have long since transcended the mere business of making music. And they deserve their place on power lists.

But let's not kid ourselves by pretending that 1Xtra's list is anything other than a waste of space. And let's not pretend that Ed Sheeran being at the top is the biggest issue here: if this list had not been limited to artists, I'd be willing to bet there would be even more white people on the list. That's the real issue, not whether Wiley has been influenced by a lad from Suffolk with an acoustic guitar.