If you ask the accountants at some major labels, British soul is basking in a golden age. While record sales have flatlined, Sam Smith and Adele have been shifting albums by the pound. They’ve racked up awards both here and in the States, and provided a smooth soundtrack for a million coffee franchises. Meanwhile, Ed Sheeran is strumming with Pharrell, James Blake is collaborating with the RZA, and Jessie J has been belting out lung-busters under the watchful eye of R&B hit factory Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. No doubt Brit soul, a genre taken seriously enough to warrant its own extensive Wikipedia page, is booming. There’s only one thing that seems to be missing: black artists.

As many have pointed out, all this Grammy-grabbing and Mobo-snatching has been a pretty pale affair. It’s almost impossible to name a black British soul or R&B act who has had any major success in the last couple of years. There may have been some attempts to classify FKA Twigs as an “alternative R&B” act, but she has rightfully kyboshed the notion, memorably stating “fuck alternative R&B” when asked about her place in the genre. The irony here is that the previously anonymous artist – her music closer to Björk’s than Aaliyah’s – only picked up the alt-R&B label when photos revealed her mixed-race heritage. Realistically, in the current UK soul scene, that heritage would have made her an exception rather than a rule.

It wasn’t always so. While English singers from Mick Jagger to Mick Hucknall have long shown a flair for repackaging American R&B, they used to exist alongside a credible pool of black British talent. The 80s saw both Sade and Soul II Soul score global hits, followed by a 90s rush of talent that saw Omar, Carleen Anderson and Caron Wheeler take on the “mature” end of the market, while teen idols from Craig David to Ms Dynamite dominated the mainstream. But as the millennium rolled over, somewhere deep within the bowels of the pop colossus a switch was flicked. Suddenly, labels were signing the likes of Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Joss Stone, and soon started squeezing megahits from the blue-eyed gospel of Sam Smith and Ella Henderson. Other than the occasional instances – JLS, Alexandra Burke or Leona Lewis – Brit soul has had a white face for nearly a decade.

It’s worth noting that these isolated successes have come through TV talent shows. But rather than this proving that talent shows support black artists, the comparatively low proportion of success stories suggests quite the opposite – something Kazeem Ajobe, Nigerian-born singer of X Factor runners-up Rough Copy, agrees with.

“The simple truth is this,” he explains over the phone. “When a white person sings like a black person, it’s a phenomenon; it’s headline news. When a black singer sounds black there is no news angle, it’s just normal. So labels think it’s easier to package and sell a white R&B artist than a black one. ”

Ajobe has some firsthand experience to lend credence to his claim. Having breezed through the 2013 competition with a line in slick R&B jams, the Rough Copy trio bowed out in the semi-finals before landing a deal with Epic Records. 2014 was supposed to be the year they brought some swagger back to UK pop – but they soon felt that Epic had little interest in marketing them. While the record label was devoting its energy into carving out soul hits for Ella Henderson, a teenager from Grimsby with an earnest ambition to become Aretha Franklin-lite, Rough Copy were railroaded into the pop mish-mash of their first single, Street Love – a clunker of ill-chosen Anita Baker samples and synths nicked from Skrillex’s dustbin. Ajobe claims the band had been promised “90s R&B, like Jodeci or 112 – our music”. What they got was the sound of middle-aged executives gambling on what teenagers listened to and coming up snake eyes.

Predictably, the single failed to break the top 10, and the band were swiftly dropped, leaving Ajobe mirroring the statements voiced by Selma actor David Oyelowo – that Britain won’t see talent until it is recognised abroad.

“American R&B artists come over here and sell out arenas, when we have talent at home that hasn’t been given a chance. You get to the point where you have to run away and feed yourself back in through another route. It happened with Floetry, it happened with Estelle. They had to go to America to blow up before the UK wanted them. At the end of the day, you don’t run away because you have a choice. You run away because you have no choice.”

Still, there is hope for the future: Ajobe now hopes to emulate the success of grime acts who have broken into the mainstream on their own terms: Rough Copy are seeking an independent route to success by creating a fanbase outside of mainstream channels. Recently, the Liverpudlian five-piece MiC Lowry, who are all of mixed-race or black heritage, secured a label deal with Polydor based on the popularity of their YouTube covers of Beyoncé and Frank Ocean, and sincere slow jams borrowing the emotional harmonies of a young Boyz II Men – the latter of which might not be the most zeitgeisty sound, but no one would argue with MiC Lowry’s massive view counts.

As X Factor viewing figures drop to their lowest in a decade, and Simon Cowell’s facile obsession with “back story” fades into nothing more than a seedy memory, maybe, just maybe, this new social media-backed path to success can finally bring a little much-needed swagger back to British soul.