201.4 million albums were sold over the year, generating 2.4 billion streaming books.
It’s a big year for Music in the UK. Carried by the «streaming» and vinyl, British spending on musical recordings has never been so high, according to figures released Wednesday January 8 by a sectoral organization, boosted in particular by the album of American star Taylor Swift. Spending on music purchases (which includes subscriptions to streaming platforms, or «streaming») reached nearly 2.4 billion pounds (2.9 billion euros) in the United Kingdom last year, surpassing the previous record of 2001 by almost 8%, at a time when the CD was king. Music consumption reached the equivalent of 201.4 million albums over the year, a 20-year high, and streaming alone represented “the equivalent of 178 million albums”added the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) in a statement.
For Kim Bayley, Managing Director of ERA, these figures mark “the spectacular culmination of the return of music, which has seen its sales more than double since a low in 2013”bouncing back after decades of piracy. Services such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music saw their revenues from music streaming increase by 7.8% last year, to more than 2 billion pounds, while sales of vinyl albums, which are experiencing a new golden age for several years, jumped 10.5% to almost 200 million pounds. The best-selling album of the year was pop star Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department (nearly 784,000 copies), which completed its release last month in Vancouver, Canada. «Eras tour»the highest-grossing world tour in history. Overall, entertainment media saw sales exceed £12 billion for the first time last year in the UK, according to the ERA, also driven by the growth of online video content, but penalized by physical sales of video games, which fell by more than a third over the year.
