There I was on New Year’s Eve, after a rather splendid late lunch/early tea (tea is like dinner if you are from the North of England, which I am), sitting down with a glass of wine; non alcoholic Pinot Noir, for those who are interested. The television (more on that in next week’s Sunday Thoughts) was on in the background, tuned to BBC News, when an item grabbed my attention. An article about how the UK music industry has grown significantly in 2025. These aren’t figures for the HiFi and home audio industry, I know, but I wanted to have a look at what was going on, nevertheless.

So, I did what most of us do when interest is piqued, and had a closer look at what has actually been going on. I used Notebook LM to collate the facts from various online sources. 

The UK music industry has continued to grow, and I‘d suggest that’s pretty cool news. Growth has been steady rather than explosive, particularly when compared with the immediate post-pandemic period, which saw growth in double digits; this is not surprising given we were all sitting at home and bored out of our tiny little minds during that time.

In 2024, the music industry contributed eight billion quid in Gross Value to the UK economy. That was a five per cent increase on the previous year. Export revenues followed the same kind of path, rising by five per cent to reach 4.8 billion pounds. Around two hundred and twenty thousand jobs are now supported by the music industry in the UK. 

On the consumption side, Brits listened to the equivalent of two hundred and ten point three million albums by UK artists in 2025 (BPI). That’s the eleventh consecutive year of growth in album equivalent sales. On paper, this all looks very positive and shows that the music industry is an important sector for the UK. It also shows that UK-produced music is important to consumers. 

In 2024, recorded music revenues reached a twenty-year high of two thousand three hundred and eighty nine million quid. However, this initially impressive figure comes with an important caveat. When adjusted for inflation, that figure still sits well below the peak of 2001, which would be worth over four billion pounds in today’s money – that’s a mahoosive shortfall! 

One of the more interesting bits of the current growth story for me is the interest in physical media. In an age where digital music and instant aural gratification are king, physical formats have become a bit of a good news story for the industry. Vinyl sales grew by thirteen point three per cent in 2025; this is the eighteenth consecutive year of growth for the black stuff. From the manufacturing perspective, vinyl orders increased by fifty per cent in the first half of 2025. The Vinyl Revival seems to be continuing. 

A good deal of this growth seems to be driven by younger listeners, which I thought was really interesting and good news, given some of the topics I’ve covered in my Sunday Thoughts pieces. Gen Z seem to be the main group behind vinyl’s popularity. Eighty per cent of Gen Z vinyl fans own a turntable, and seventy-six per cent buy records at least once a month. This suggests commitment to the format, though what the 20 per cent of Gen Z vinyl fans who don’t own a record player do with their liquorice pizzas is anyone’s guess. Answers on a postcard, please.

Interest is also filtering down to those under sixteen, too. Forty-six per cent of this group now listen to physical formats such as CDs, vinyl, or cassettes. This surprised me a bit, given the general perception is that the yoof listen to streaming and streaming alone. 

Taylor Swift is a huge player in this physical media revival. Her album The Life of a Showgirl sold one hundred and forty-seven thousand vinyl records in the UK, and represented the highest-selling vinyl release since the nineteen-nineties. Not my cup of tea, to be honest, but the truth is that this is what younger folk are listening to, and perhaps we, as the people who are supposed to be influencing this market from a HiFi perspective, should take note. The same day I heard the news, I was also watching Top Of The Pops’ review of the year, and after much shouting at the telly about it being filmed in SpiritLand in London, and me yelling, “I’ve touched that exact record player”, they played a video recorded at (if I recall correctly) the Reading Festival. All but the odd “BBC 6 Music Dad” members of the crowd were girls and young women aged below 20. The singer was Chapel Roan (I think they referred to her as the Princess of the Midwest), and pretty much without exception, the whole of the huge crowd was singing along and doing the associated dance to Chapel’s tune Hot To Go. The question of whether us HiFi Oldies are missing a trick here sprang to mind… yet again.

CDs have had a renaissance among Gen Z, too, but overall CD sales still declined. Cassette tapes saw growth, too. However, they remain a niche market.

Live music was another area of growth. And a really good demonstration of this was the Oasis reunion in 2025. I recall hours of virtual queuing for tickets in 2024 for our youngest, only to get to the front and find out they cost about a gazillion quid due to dynamic pricing. He got tickets costing a couple of hundred quid or so and regrets nothing! And this latter point is interesting as it suggests to me that younger folk are willing to spunk decent chunks of money on music if the offer is appealing enough, though the more relevant question here might centre around how we translate this into them buying HiFi gear. 

Over two point two million tickets were sold for the Oasis gigs. On a per-show basis, Oasis apparently earned about nine point seven million pounds. Nice work if you can get it, our kid! I think it’s interesting to compare the number of people who bought tickets to see Oasis and the number of The Life of a Showgirl vinyl copies that were sold.

Beyond lining the designer anorak pockets of the Gallagher brothers, the five night residency at Heaton Park in Manchester was projected to bring a two hundred and seventy seven million pound spending boost to the local economy. This included more than sixty-three million pounds spent on food and drink, and fifty-four million pounds on shopping across the city. These are big numbers and demonstrate that local economies can and should see the music economy as being important and valuable, though I’d love to see this trickle down to investment in more grass-roots venues and community-based projects. The truth is, however, that in the UK, one in four late-night venues has closed since 2020. 

Streaming dominates the recorded music market, accounting for roughly eighty-five per cent of it.

Artificial intelligence has come out as another source of concern, and it’s a topic I’ve talked about previously in my Sunday Thoughts articles. Sixty-six per cent of music creators see AI as a threat to their careers. The concerns include the unlicensed use of music to train AI systems and the growing presence of AI-generated content in streaming playlists, potentially displacing human-created work. I have strong feelings on this and believe that music as art can (and should) only be a human endeavour, though I have no objection to musicians using AI as tools. Yes, an AI-generated tune might sound pleasing and press all the psychological buttons we want it to, but that’s not art, it’s the musical equivalent of painting by numbers. The same argument is going in in photographic circles, and the backlash is to the point where folk are posting their legitimate photos, only to be told by other Facebook group members that their work is AI: sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. I think there will be more of a backlash around this from older music consumers rather than younger ones. 

Post-Brexit hassles continue to affect UK musos, too. Ninety-five per cent of those impacted by Brexit reported a decrease in earnings. Touring, once a reliable income stream, has become more complex and costly. The pain-in-the-arse of going over to Europe is stopping bands from taking the trip. Where once they could hop on a Eurostar and face little or no grief at the border, now they have to have a carnet that itemises everything down to the most basic of gear (guitar leads, for example) – most small bands aren’t bureaucracy savvy and so just don’t bother. This morning’s Observer posted YouGov figures suggesting that fifty-six per cent of Britons strongly or somewhat support rejoining the European Union, with 10 saying they don’t know and 24 somewhat or strongly opposing rejoining. 

Half of the UK’s remaining recording studios are reportedly at risk of closure. Rising business rates and no growth in what they are able to charge bands have placed massive pressures on spaces that have always played a crucial role in artist development. Industry bodies such as UK Music are calling for government action to help growth into 2026 and beyond. Proposals include the introduction of a Music Growth Package (I’ll look at this in more detail if and when anything happens), reviews of business rates for venues and studios, and legislative action to protect copyright in the face of AI development. 

So, on the face of it, there is evidence that the music industry in the UK is growing and finding new ways to increase revenues, with the physical formats and major live events leading this growth. However, it’s also clear that all is not plain sailing and there are very real tensions and issues in the industry that will affect the sector. 

I’ve purposefully not gone into talking too much about how I think the HiFi industry can react to these figures, but what is clear is that music is still hugely relevant to people in the UK, and, importantly, that they are willing to spend money on physical media and live events. The question is the perennial one of how we now engage these music lovers to become fully paid-up consumers of home audio equipment.

The lessons that stand out for me are that we should engage more with live music, play a wider variety of music at shows (if we can get the young folk to attend in the first place), and recognise that young women are major consumers of music. 

Stu

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