2024 proved another milestone year for UK recorded music, with BPI analysis based on Official Charts data revealing new heights for streaming, record-breaking success for women and a return to growth for physical music sales.
The BPI, the representative voice for the UK’s world-leading record companies and label businesses, reveals UK recorded music consumption across sales and streams rose 9.7% last year to 200.5 million albums (or their equivalent) – marking a decade of uninterrupted growth.
This growth was driven by an 11.0% rise in the streaming market, with 199.6 billion audio streams accumulated over the course of the year, contributing to a market where streaming now makes up 88.8% of consumption (2023: 87.7%). In May, the Official Charts Company recorded over 4 billion audio streams in a single week for the first time ever.
With audio streaming consumption having more than doubled in six years – underpinned by the long-term investment and backing of record labels in supporting a diverse range of artists and new talent, and enabled by the UK’s gold-standard copyright regime – British recorded music continues to experience a rapidly-growing streaming market.
In the five years between 2018 and 2023, UK record labels invested well over £2 billion in marketing and A&R, while more artists are benefitting from streaming than ever before. Success in streaming for artists is now measured in the hundreds of millions and even billions, with more active than ever before and well over 10,000 surpassing the threshold of 1 million audio streams in the UK alone over the course of 2023.
Notable drivers of the overall market growth in 2024 included a record-breaking performance by women across not just singles, as in 2023, but albums also; continued chart success for British acts; and a steadily growing demand for album releases on physical formats. More information can be found below.
However, in spite of UK recorded music hitting new heights in 2024, British music’s podium position is being challenged by rapidly intensifying global competition, while a new government consultation on AI and copyright risks taking value away from British artists and the rightsholders that support them in a way that could severely undermine the UK music industry and its prospects and Britain’s cultural power.
Dr. Jo Twist OBE, BPI Chief Executive, said:
“We’ve seen another strong year benefitting from streaming and driven by era-defining women. It’s clear that, thanks to strong investment in diverse artists by record labels, paired with a world-class rights framework, British music has huge potential for continued growth and global impact.
“From Coldplay, and Charli XCX, to The Last Dinner Party, and Myles Smith, there were plenty of examples of UK music success stories in 2024. But there are also rising challenges for domestic talent in a rapidly changing and hyper-competitive global music economy.
“The UK’s creative output and human creativity is being placed at risk by proposed changes to British copyright law, which would allow international tech giants to train AI models on artists’ work without payment or permission, and would be the wrong way to realise the exciting potential of AI. Meanwhile, streaming fraud is also a rising concern.
“By meeting the growing global challenge head-on, tackling challenges around AI, copyright and streaming fraud, and encouraging consumers towards viable models, like paid streaming subscriptions, we can help to ensure that the value of British music is protected and that our industry can continue to grow and flourish at home and around the world.
“The UK remains a world music power, but this status cannot be taken for granted: we need a supportive policy environment that puts the focus on human artistry and enables continued investment in the next generation of British talent.”
A landmark year for women
In a year where Charli XCX memorably gave us a “Brat Summer”, six of the top 10 and half of the 20 biggest artist albums of the year were by women, headed by Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. The album accumulated over 783,000 sales by the end of December – the most for any artist release in a calendar year since 2017. It was one of four albums by the US superstar to finish among the year’s 20 biggest titles, with the Official Albums Chart also including 1989 (Taylor’s Version), Lover and Folklore.
There were also places in the year-end Top 20 for albums by Billie Eilish (Hit Me Hard And Soft), Sabrina Carpenter (Short N’ Sweet), Olivia Rodrigo (Sour), Chappell Roan (The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess) and Charli XCX, whose sixth studio album Brat reached No.1 on the Official Albums Chart and became a hit across the world. It has since been nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards, one of seven nominations received by the artist, with The BRIT Awards still to come, while its social impact was reflected by Collins English Dictionary selecting “brat” as its word of the year.
Brat, which was also one of the Mercury Prize Albums of the Year, was one of 12 albums by solo women artists or groups to top the Official Albums Chart in 2024, equaling the most in any calendar year (there were also 12 in 2023). These also included Prelude To Ecstasy, the debut album by 2024 BRITs Rising Star Award winners The Last Dinner Party, and new releases by fellow UK artists Dua Lipa (Radical Optimism) and Beabadoobee (This Is How Tomorrow Moves) alongside US stars including Ariana Grande (Eternal Sunshine), Beyoncé (Cowboy Carter), and Gracie Abrams (The Secret Of Us).
On the Official Singles Chart women beat a record-breaking run of 31 weeks at No.1 in 2023, helped in no small part by Sabrina Carpenter, who alone spent 21 weeks at the top via her three chart-toppers Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste. Women were also responsible for 47% of tracks that reached the weekly Top 10 during the year. This was greater than the share attributable to men (44%) and included chart-toppers by artists such as Beyoncé (Texas Hold ‘Em), Charli XCX (Guess ft. Billie Eilish), Gigi Perez (Sailor Song) and Gracie Abrams (That’s So True).
Success for British artists – but global competition is intensifying
More than 20 British groups and solo acts topped the Official Albums Chart during the year.
These included The Last Dinner Party, hip-hop collective D-Block Europe, pop stars Charli XCX and Dua Lipa, singer-songwriters James Arthur, Beabadoobee and Lewis Capaldi, rock bands Blossoms, Elbow, Idles, James, Kasabian, The Libertines, Shed Seven, and Snow Patrol, star pairings Rod Stewart & Jools Holland, Michael Ball & Alfie Boe, and Liam Gallagher & John Squire, and music legends David Gilmour, Oasis, Coldplay and The Cure.
There were notable UK successes in 2024, including by such breakthrough artists as Artemas and Myles Smith. Artemas’s I Like The Way You Kiss Me and Smith’s Stargazing were among the year’s 20 biggest singles and became global hits. Other UK successes included Backbone, a chart-topping collaboration between Chase & Status and Stormzy, solo Top-10 hits for Little Mix stars Jade and Perrie, and Central Cee scoring his eighth Top-10 Official Singles Chart hit and a first US Billboard Hot 100 Top-20 entry.
While UK artists and music companies remain at the vanguard of talent and creativity, 2024 also highlighted the intensifying global competition provided by both by traditional leading players, such as the US, as well as from emerging, fast-growing markets like South Korea and Latin America, which are achieving international success with their artists in part because their governments are backing their industries. UK artists were behind just nine of the 40 top tracks of 2024 across streaming and sales, with the highest being Stargazing by Myles Smith at number 12. Five years ago, in 2019, 19 of the year’s 40 biggest singles were by UK artists.
US singer-songwriter Noah Kahan scored the year’s biggest song hit with his slow-burning Stick Season, the title track off his third studio album. Having first been released in 2022, it finally reached No.1 in January 2024 and stayed there for seven weeks. It was joined in the year’s top five by Benson Boone (Beautiful Things), Sabrina Carpenter (Espresso), Teddy Swims (Lose Control) and Hozier (Too Sweet).
Physical album sales return to growth
Sales of albums on physical format increased year-on-year for the first time since 1994 in 2024, by 1.4%. This included a 17th consecutive rise in vinyl purchases, taking the market to a three-decade high, with sales growing by 9.1% to 6.7 million units.
While catalogue continues to play an important role in this revival, brand new releases are increasingly driving vinyl LP sales, as shown by seven of the year’s 10 biggest sellers having been released in the calendar year. These were headed by Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, which sold more than 111,000 vinyl LPs, and also included new albums by Billie Eilish (Hit Me Hard And Soft), Fontaines D.C. (Romance), The Cure (Songs Of A Lost World) and Charli XCX (Brat).
In a year in which Oasis’s first concerts in fifteen years were announced, a 30th anniversary re-issue of their iconic debut album Definitely Maybe was the second most popular vinyl LP of the year.
Although the increased demand for physical music was led by vinyl sales, there were signs of a shoring up in the CD market. In 2022, CD unit sales dropped 19.4%, becoming then the latest in a long succession of annual double-digit percentage drops for the format. But this decline has since slowed, having decreased by 6.9% in 2023. The pattern continued in 2024, with purchases falling by just 2.9% to 10.5 million units.
As with vinyl, the top CDs were new releases. All but one of the 20 biggest sellers came out in 2024 or 2023, with the top two – Coldplay’s Moon Music and The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift – selling over 400,000 copies between them. Moon Music achieved 182,166 sales in its week of release in October, the highest for any album on the format since Ed Sheeran’s ÷ in 2017. The group’s tenth No.1 out of ten studio releases, Moon Music finished as the year’s top-selling CD and was the ninth-biggest selling album overall.
British artists provided six of the ten top CD sellers of the year, with Coldplay joined by David Gilmour (Luck And Strange), Charli XCX (Brat), The Cure (Songs Of A Lost World), Michael Ball & Alfie Boe (Together At Home) and Rod Stewart & Jools Holland’s Swing Fever.
