The consumption of music in the UK is now higher than in any year since 2006, when the industry was being powered by the downloadable mp3 file. Thirteen years ago, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley became the first song to get to No 1 on downloads alone as consumers switched over from CD singles and filled up iPods with individually purchased tracks (and, possibly, pirated ones too), while still purchasing plenty of CD albums.
In the years since there have been seismic changes in the industry. As CD players in new cars and home entertainment systems become rarer, while vinyl’s tactility and size remains more appealing to some, the CD is becoming a marginal format (though they still outsell vinyl by more than five to one). Downloads appear even more anachronistic. Indeed, the very idea of ownership of music – most of all the ownership of intangible mp3 files – is starting to feel quaint to many as more and more of us switch over to streaming.
While the data says we’re not consuming as many albums in 2020 as compared with 2006, this is mostly a wrinkle of how the music industry awkwardly works out what an “album sale” is in the playlist-dominant streaming age. Rather than buy an album or individual tracks from it, many of us now pay a monthly sum (or endure advertising) to have unlimited access to vast libraries of songs. We’re now playing more than 100bn tracks a year, a wild orgy of music consumption.
Whether the music has improved or not is a matter of taste, but there’s no doubt the UK can still generate big stars: the banter-inclined Scottish balladeer Lewis Capaldi was the most streamed artist in the UK in 2019 and also topped the US singles chart in October. What is also certain is that with revenues increasing as more of us subscribe to streaming services, artists will clamour louder for that money to be reinvested in the industry – including, amid disquiet at low royalty rates from the likes of Spotify, in the artists themselves.
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