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

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

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 Season, 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 market 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 units than vinyl, with 10.5 million albums bought.

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 say definitively – music is back,” she added in a statement.

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

Adjusted for inflation, 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.

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 revenue, 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 find an audience.

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 new releases, and two of those were updates to existing franchises.

The power of Nintendo Switch was also apparent, with half of the top 10 games comprising titles exclusive to the console.