Research - What is Selling Well

This chart shows the album sales in the UK by the country of the artist's origin, the figures show that 51.9% of the albums sold in the UK last year were of UK artists, and second were American artists who made up 33.8% of album sales. These figures demonstrate that UK artists sell really well in the UK and that new British artists are often welcomed with lots of support in the UK.

The chart below shows the best selling singles of the past year in the UK and how long they remained in the top 10 for. According to this, almost all of the best selling singles of the past year have been of the Pop genre, singles like Happy, Story of My Life, and Trumpets are all examples of singles from this genre. Although, artists like Martin Garrix, Mr Probz, Avicii, and Clean Bandit have also made it into  the top selling singles, which shows that music belonging to the umbrella term EDM is growing more and more popular.

Top selling singles in the UK charts over the past year,

Headline from a BBC online article published in February 2014

Digital album sales and a surge in streaming boosted total digital revenue in 2013 to £365m - up from £326m in 2012.

Streaming revenue increased by 41%, bringing total UK revenue to £730.4m - the first growth since 2009.

£54.7m was generated last year alone through subscriptions on streaming sites such as Spotify.

The BPI said some 7.4bn songs were streamed in 2013, double the levels of 2012.

Digital album sales also grew 19.5% to £160.5m, helped by the success of new British acts like Bastille - who scored the biggest selling digital album of the year with their debut Bad Blood.

However sales of vinyl LPs grew 49% to £12.1m, the highest level of annual income for the format since 1995.

From these stats taken from BPI's figures, it is clear to see that the use of digital streaming and digital downloads is how music is now selling and is vital to the UK market. It also shows that new indie-pop Birtish bands such as Bastille are selling albums more than anyone else. This means that there is still a strong desire for this type of music in the UK and people are still buying albums. Also, there is an increasing income from vinyl LP sales, with bands such as Arctic Monkeys releasing their albums onto vinyl as well as CDs. As vinyl is becoming more popular among the younger generations it gives an insight into the groups of people who are spending their money on buying music.