2024 was a huge year for music in the UK, with a total of £2.4 billion spent on recorded music. This is according to data from the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA), a UK trade organisation that publishes annual statistics about the UK's music, video and game sectors.
The ERA credits streaming-service subscriptions and physical format purchases (including the "retail-led vinyl revival") for the increase in music consumption in the UK, which is the highest it has been in 20 years.
According to the ERA: "Streaming alone generated the equivalent of 178m albums, exceeding the record of 172m albums sold in 2004 at the tail-end of the CD boom. Meanwhile consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – reached £2389.8m [£2.39bn] overtaking the previous high of £2221.7m [£2.22bn] achieved in 2001." (Note that the figures are not adjusted for inflation.)
Digging into the numbers is interesting. Streaming accounts for a staggering 84.5 per cent of that total revenue in 2024. This was thanks to people signing up to music streaming services such as Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube, and is a 7.8 per cent rise over 2023. While the report doesn't go into detail on which music platform accrued the most growth and revenue, it's clear that online streaming and using music apps is by far the most dominant way we consume music in the UK. This complements BPI's 2024 report, which credits the recorded music industry's growth in 2024 to "an 11% rise in the streaming market, with 199.6 billion audio streams accumulated over the course of the year."
Listening to music via streaming has "more than doubled in six years", while the Official Charts Company (which is co-owned by ERA and BPI) recorded "over 4 billion audio streams in a single week for the first time ever" in May 2024.
People's love for the vinyl format has not abated either, with vinyl sales rising by an impressive 10.5 per cent to £196m sales in 2024. That's 6.7 million vinyl records sold. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is credited with being both the biggest-selling album and the biggest driver of vinyl album sales in 2024. It sold 783,820 albums in total, with 111,937 of those being on vinyl. Definitely Maybe by Oasis, who announced a reunion tour alongside the 30th-anniversary re-issue of their first album, came second in the vinyl album charts.
CD sales have plateaued at £126.2m, but it continues to outsell vinyl in terms of units, with 10.5 million CD albums sold in 2024. The best-selling CD album of 2024? Moon Music by Coldplay. Physical format sales in total rose by 6.2 per cent in 2024, but music downloads took a hit, falling by 3.2 per cent to its lowest in three years.
ERA's CEO Kim Bayley states: “2024 was a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume. This is the stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”
While those of us at What Hi-Fi? towers and our readers will no doubt say that music never went away for us, it's still heartening to see that music fans in the UK are investing in albums and music more, regardless of format. It's perhaps no surprise to see subscription services take such a big slice of the revenue pie, but to see growth in streaming alongside an increase in buying physical formats such as vinyl means that people are happy to pay (sometimes rather high) prices for music – and that can only be a good thing for the industry and artists as a whole.
According to the Official Charts, the best-selling albums of 2024 after Taylor Swift include Billie Eilish, Weeknd, Noah Kahan and Charli XCX (2024 was, after all, the year of Brat). Fleetwood Mac's 50 Years - Don't Stop compilation album came in at #7, while rising stars Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan made the top 10 in overall albums and vinyl album sales.
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