‘Music is back’ as sales hit a 20-year high

Captivated by major recent releases from Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Billie Eilish, music fans in the UK spent more on recorded music in 2024 than ever before, recent figures display.

Streaming subscriptions and vinyl sales shot up, with consumers spending a total of £2.4 bn over the last 12 months.

That overtakes the previous high of £2.2bn, achieved at the peak of CD sales in 2001.

The biggest-selling album of the year was Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department which sold 783,820 copies; while Noah Kahan had the year’s biggest single with Stick period, which generated the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

The figures came from the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA), which said subscriptions to services like Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music accounted for almost 85% of the money spent on music last year.

The economy for vinyl records grew by 10.5%, with 6.7 million discs sold last year, generating £196m.

CD sales remained flat at £126.2m – although the format still sells more than vinyl in terms of units, with 10.5 million albums bought.

The music industry has taken years to recover from the advent of the digital era, when piracy and illegal streaming sites ate into profits.

At its nadir, in 2014, returns from recorded music in the UK dropped to £1.03 billion.

The same year, streams started being included into the official charts; and the achievement of “all-you-can-play” services like Spotify has been almost solely responsible for the recovery – with subscription revenues jumping from £175 million to £2 billion in the course of decade.

The head of ERA, Kim Bayley, called 2024 a “banner year” for music, with sales at more than double the low point of 2013.

“We can now declare definitively – music is back,” she added in a statement.

However, music industry returns still lags far behind the 2001 figures in real terms.

Adjusted for worth rise, the industry made the equivalent of £4bn in 2001, when Dido’s was the year’s biggest album, with sales of 1.9 million.

There are also lingering questions over how artists get paid in the streaming economy. According to the Musicians Union, almost half of working musicians in the UK earn less than £14,000 a year.

“Sadly, professional musicians, artists and songwriters are not enjoying the boom represented by these figures,” said the union’s general secretary, Naomi Pohl.

“They are facing multiple problems including the high expense of living and touring, stagnating community arts financing, problems touring in the EU post-Brexit and, crucially, they are not receiving their fair distribute of streaming returns.”

Elsewhere, ERA said video was the most popular form of home entertainment, with cinephiles and telly addicts spending more than £5bn on streaming services, movie rentals and DVDs.

The biggest-selling title of the year was the comic book movie Deadpool & Wolverine, with sales of 561,917, more than 80% of which were digital.

Video games saw a drop in returns, from £4.8bn in 2023 to £4.6bn last year.

The figures reflect a year of high-profile flops, with A-list games like Concord, Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones all failing to discover an spectators.

There was also a huge shift away from boxed physical games, whose sales fell by 35%.

The biggest-selling game of the year was once again EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as FIFA – which sold 2.9m copies, 80% of them in digital formats.

However, only four of the games in the top 10 were recent releases, and two of those were updates to existing franchises.

The power of Nintendo’s Switch was also apparent, with half of the top 10 including games comprised of titles that are exclusive to the console.