News

2015 will quite rightly be remembered as the year that vinyl made a comeback, but it was also a pretty impressive 12 months for music sales all round with UK consumers spending more on singles, albums and subscription music services than any year since 2011. In fact the only bad news was for music downloads, which suffered a considerable decline.

In all, recorded music enjoyed £1.06bn profit, which is a 3.5 percent improvement on 2014's £1.02bn. Physical formats were responsible for 49 percent of this figure, but the biggest winner, of course, was vinyl. Record sales enjoyed a 64 percent increase in sales – up to 2.1m copies from 2014's 1.3m units.

CD experienced a reduced rate of decline, with sales down just 3.9 percent from 2014 (compared with a 7.9 percent decrease in 2014 and a whoping great 20 percent in 2012), with 53.6m units sold.

Audio streaming from both ad-funded and subscription platforms (such as Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer and Google Play) saw an impressive rise by 82 percent, with some 26.8bn songs streamed over the year.

Data provided by BPI/Official Charts Company