Taylor Swift and Noah Kahan lead 'banner year' for music sales in 2024

Streaming giants such as Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon contributed to a 7.8% revenue increase in music, reaching £2.018bn. Meanwhile, vinyl album sales saw a 10.5% jump to £196m, though CD album revenues remained steady at £126.2m

Taylor Swift and Noah Kahan have been hailed as the leading lights in a "banner year" for music sales in 2024, with a surge driven by streaming platforms and a resurgence in vinyl popularity, new figures have disclosed.

According to the latest annual data from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA, UK music consumption and recorded music revenues soared to a 20-year peak, surpassing even the zenith of the CD era.

Streaming giants such as Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon contributed to a 7.8% revenue increase in music, reaching £2.018bn. Meanwhile, vinyl album sales saw a 10.5% jump to £196m, though CD album revenues remained steady at £126.2m.

Taylor Swift's 'The Tortured Poets Department' dominated as the year's top-selling album with 783,820 units sold, including 111,937 on vinyl, making it the most popular vinyl album of 2024. Noah Kahan's hit 'Stick Season' was crowned the biggest single, amassing the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

Overall, consumer spending on recorded music, encompassing both subscriptions and purchases, hit £2.4bn, eclipsing the previous record of £2.2bn set in 2001, as per ERA. Kim Bayley, CEO of ERA, said: "2024 was a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

"This is 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."

Preliminary figures reveal that music revenues saw a growth of 7.4% in 2024, outpacing video, which increased by 6.9%, and games, which experienced a decline of 4.4%. The surge in video was fuelled by subscriptions to services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, which grew by 8.3% to £4.5 billion – accounting for nearly 90% of the sector’s revenues.

The top-selling title of the year was Deadpool & Wolverine, with digital sales making up more than 80% of its 561,917 total sales. Despite the games sector witnessing a 4.4% drop last year, it remains almost double the size of the recorded music business.

The year marked a shift away from full game sales, with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, while subscription models saw a growth of 12%. The best-selling game of the year was once again EA Sports FC 25 – previously known as Fifa – which generated 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them in digital formats.