UK music consumption achieves a decade of growth according to figures released by the BPI. The figures based on Official Charts Company data showed that 200.5 million albums or their equivalent were either streamed or purchased in 2024. The UK consumption total was made up primarily of streams, comprising 199.6 Bn streams, up 11% on 2023 and more than double total achieved five years earlier.
UK recorded music consumption across both sales and streams rose 9.7% last year marking a decade of uninterrupted growth. This growth was driven by the rise in the streaming market which now makes up 88.8% of consumption (2023: 87.7%). In May, the Official Charts Company recorded over 4 Bn audio streams in a single week for the first time ever.
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.
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 up 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.
