If the record business has learned anything during those brutal years between 2000 and 2014 when the CD market wobbled and then went into such sharp decline that it halved, it is to seek out good news stories wherever you can.
The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), the UK trade body for music, video and games retailers, has just issued its numbers for recorded music revenues in 2024. The sell is that this marks “a 20-year high and an all-time record, exceeding the pinnacle of the CD era”. Let joy be unconfined. Bonuses all round.
But trade numbers can only ever capture what the recorded music business is worth in toto. They tell us little of the depth and of the complexities of what has been happening here since the early 2000s.
First of all, ERA states that subscriptions and purchases (LPs, CDs, downloads and cassettes) of recorded music reached £2,389m in 2024, overtaking the “previous high” of £2,221m in 2001. But that does not account for inflation – factored in, that £2,221m would be £4,080m in 2024. Pesky inflation makes for a less appealing headline.
ERA also reports that the “equivalent” of 201m albums were consumed last year in the UK compared to the 172m albums that were purchased in 2004 “at the tail-end of the CD boom”. That sounds impressive, but there is a complex numeric alchemy in how streams are converted into the “equivalent” of sales. For ERA, 1,000 subscription streams and 6,000 ad-supported streams (eg on the free version of Spotify) across any or all of the tracks on a particular album release are used to arrive at an aggregate and vaguely album-shaped number – but conflating streams and sales is like trying to amalgamate clouds and concrete.
So there is an increasingly fusty scent of anachronism here. Streaming comprised around 85% of the total recorded music market last year, while physical sales made up 13%, and downloads the remainder. For all the hoopla about “the vinyl revival” and the industry pointing to a CD renaissance around the corner, streaming effectively is the market – yet the album is the unit the industry persists on using to calculate success.
In 2025, trying to explain success in “album” terms is archaic at best and desperately unfit for purpose at worst. It is taking the biggest part of the market and trying to explain it through the language of the smallest part. It should be the other way around, where physical sales are translated into whatever ERA feels should be their streaming equivalent. That would be more appropriate for a reality where many listeners cherry-pick album tracks for playlists, while Spotify seems to deprioritise the album format (no mention of them in their annual Wrapped data packages, for example, which focus on tracks and artists).
The past decade for the record business has been one of recovery and regrowth, hoping to put the traumas of the Napster-led piracy age in the rearview mirror. Those blue remembered hills of the profligate late 1990s are, however, still far out of reach for many.
Since then major labels, in a flurry of consolidation, went from five to three in that time and so market power has been concentrated in the hands of fewer companies. The surface numbers also tell us nothing of what it means today for recording artists, and why royalties from CD sales are not always being made up for by royalties from streams. A thousand premium streams might “equal” an album for the industry’s computation purposes, but the royalties from them – which also vary depending on the terms of their record label deals – weigh a lot lighter in the pockets of artists compared to the peak of the CD business.
The past, of course, is a foreign country where things are done differently; directly comparing today to the turn of the century only reveals fragments of what has changed or what has stayed the same. But if the record business is to truly speak from the 21st century, it at least needs to establish a new and appropriate system of tabulation and stop reaching for the buckled abacus of yesterday.