The UK music business is reporting report revenues. The fact is way gloomier | Eamonn Forde

If the report enterprise has realized something throughout these brutal years between 2000 and 2014 when the CD market wobbled after which went into such sharp decline that it halved, it’s to hunt out excellent news tales wherever you possibly can.

The Leisure Retailers Affiliation (ERA), the UK commerce physique for music, video and video games retailers, has simply issued its numbers for recorded music revenues in 2024. The promote is that this marks “a 20-year excessive and an all-time report, exceeding the top of the CD period”. Let pleasure be unconfined. Bonuses all spherical.

However commerce numbers can solely ever seize what the recorded music enterprise is value in toto. They inform us little of the depth and of the complexities of what has been occurring right here because the early 2000s.

Initially, ERA states that subscriptions and purchases (LPs, CDs, downloads and cassettes) of recorded music reached £2,389m in 2024, overtaking the “earlier excessive” of £2,221m in 2001. However that doesn’t account for inflation – factored in, that £2,221m could be £4,080m in 2024. Pesky inflation makes for a much less interesting headline.

ERA additionally reviews that the “equal” of 201m albums had been consumed final yr within the UK in comparison with the 172m albums that had been bought in 2004 “on the tail-end of the CD growth”. That sounds spectacular, however there’s a advanced numeric alchemy in how streams are transformed into the “equal” of gross sales. For ERA, 1,000 subscription streams and 6,000 ad-supported streams (eg on the free model of Spotify) throughout any or the entire tracks on a specific album launch are used to reach at an mixture and vaguely album-shaped quantity – however conflating streams and gross sales is like making an attempt to amalgamate clouds and concrete.

So there may be an more and more fusty scent of anachronism right here. Streaming comprised round 85% of the entire recorded music market final yr, whereas bodily gross sales made up 13%, and downloads the rest. For all of the hoopla about “the vinyl revival” and the business pointing to a CD renaissance across the nook, streaming successfully is the market – but the album is the unit the business persists on utilizing to calculate success.

In 2025, making an attempt to clarify success in “album” phrases is archaic at greatest and desperately unfit for goal at worst. It’s taking the most important a part of the market and making an attempt to clarify it by the language of the smallest half. It must be the opposite means round, the place bodily gross sales are translated into no matter ERA feels must be their streaming equal. That may be extra applicable for a actuality the place many listeners cherry-pick album tracks for playlists, whereas Spotify appears to deprioritise the album format (no point out of them of their annual Wrapped knowledge packages, for instance, which concentrate on tracks and artists).

The previous decade for the report enterprise has been considered one of restoration and regrowth, hoping to place the traumas of the Napster-led piracy age within the rearview mirror. These blue remembered hills of the profligate late Nineteen Nineties are, nonetheless, nonetheless far out of attain for a lot of.

Since then main labels, in a flurry of consolidation, went from 5 to 3 in that point and so market energy has been concentrated within the fingers of fewer firms. The floor numbers additionally inform us nothing of what it means at this time for recording artists, and why royalties from CD gross sales are usually not at all times being made up for by royalties from streams. A thousand premium streams may “equal” an album for the business’s computation functions, however the royalties from them – which additionally differ relying on the phrases of their report label offers – weigh so much lighter within the pockets of artists in comparison with the height of the CD enterprise.

The previous, after all, is a international nation the place issues are accomplished in another way; instantly evaluating at this time to the flip of the century solely reveals fragments of what has modified or what has stayed the identical. But when the report enterprise is to actually communicate from the twenty first century, it at the very least wants to determine a brand new and applicable system of tabulation and cease reaching for the buckled abacus of yesterday.