UK music gross sales hit a 20-year excessive of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s newest album, and pushed by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures present.
Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time excessive, extra even than on the peak of the CD period, in response to annual figures from the digital leisure and retail affiliation ERA.
Whole shopper spending on recorded music – each subscriptions and purchases – topped the earlier document of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA stated.
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Noah Kahan performing through the Soundside Music Pageant in September. Pic: AP
Takings from streaming providers together with Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little bit over £2bn.
Nearly £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, whereas CD album revenues have been flat at simply over £126m.
Swift’s The Tortured Poets Division was the biggest-selling album of the yr, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.
Greater than 783,000 copies have been purchased, almost 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.
The most important single of the yr was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, producing the equal of 1.99 million gross sales.
ERA chief government Kim Bayley stated 2024 was “a banner yr for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high data in each worth and quantity.
Ms Bayley referred to as it 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.”
Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, whereas video rose by 6.9%, and video games fell by 4.4%, in response to preliminary figures.
Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – nearly 90% of the sector’s revenues.
Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the yr, with gross sales of 561,917 – greater than 80% of them bought digitally.
Regardless of the video games sector’s 4.4% decline final yr, it stays almost twice as giant because the recorded music enterprise.
Full sport gross sales noticed a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console video games down 15% and boxed bodily video games down 35%, in favour of subscription fashions which grew by 12%.
EA Sports activities FC 25 – previously referred to as Fifa was as soon as once more the biggest-selling sport of the yr, producing 2.9 million unit gross sales, 80% of them as digital codecs.
