The success of albums by female artists in 2024 helped arrest a two-decade-long slide in sales of physical music.
Women led the way in recorded music in 2024, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), topping the singles chart for 34 out of the 52 weeks and accounting for half of the top 20 albums for the first time.
Albums by female artists including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Billie Eilish were the engine room of growth as combined sales of streaming and physical music rose by nearly 10 percent to smash past 200 million albums or their equivalents as measured by the BPI.
Vinyl sales have risen for 17 successive years and increased rapidly again, up 9 percent to 6.7 million units. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department led the pack, beating Oasis’s album Definitely Maybe.
Sales of recorded music in physical form (including CDs and cassettes) rose by 1.4m to 17.4m, the first increase in two decades. Streaming continued to dominate, up 11m to 178m units of what the BPI calls “album-equivalent sales”, taking the overall market to 200.5m, a rise of 9.7 percent.
Globally, all five of the biggest-streamed albums were by women, including Swift’s and Carpenter’s records at number one and three, respectively. Billie Eilish’s third album Hit Me Hard and Soft was the second biggest album of the year on Spotify, with Colombian singer Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito fourth and Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine fifth.