Female artists’ success helps arrest 20-year slide in UK sales of physical music
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Physical release sales increased to 17.4m but the BPI says AI copyright exemptions put UK music industry at risk. Charli xcx’s Brat summer may have given way to cold winter, but the success of albums by female artists helped arrest a two-decade-long decline in sales of physical music.
Women led the way in recorded music this year, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), topping the singles chart for 34 out of the 52 weeks and accounting for half of the top 20 albums for the first time. Albums by female artists including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish were the engine room of growth as combined sales of streaming and physical music rose by nearly 10% to smash past 200m albums or their equivalents as measured by the BPI.
Amid the encouraging numbers, the BPI sounded a note of warning that the government’s proposals to allow artificial intelligence firms to sidestep copyright rules put the UK’s powerhouse recorded music industry at risk. But despite the looming digital threat, sales of analogue formats – led by vinyl – performed strongly.
Vinyl sales have risen for 17 successive years and increased rapidly again, up 9% to 6.7m units. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department led the pack, beating Oasis’s first album, Definitely Maybe, amid excitement around the band’s reunion. CD sales have been in steep decline in recent years but were down by just 300,000 to 10.5m, led by Coldplay’s Moon Music. Factoring in 182,000 sales in other formats such as cassettes, sales of recorded music in physical form rose by 1.4m to 17.4m, the first increase in two decades.
