Milestone or Millstone: Update
2025's first quarter UK album chart suggests 2024's issues presenting new British music continue.
In January of this year, celebratory press releases called out 2024 as a stellar year for recorded music in the UK, so I looked at that year’s album chart to see what it revealed. I published the results in an article called Milestone or Millstone? . The data suggested that both new and tenured British artists that released new music in ‘24 had struggled to compete with old music, or music made in the USA. To see whether the trend has changed so far this year, I looked at the year-to-date album chart to get a snapshot of the same data for the first quarter of 2025.
12 out of the 24 “new” albums released since the New Year, that made it into the top 200, were UK-signed and released. Sam Fender and Central Cee are the two UK-signed artists who’s albums made it into the top 10. We must congratulate the teams behind these releases; they managed to perform the rare trick of connecting these albums to wider culture, an increasingly difficult task now that the mainstream culture we used to know has dissolved and so-called water-cooler moments are so rare. They also benefited from physical pre-order campaigns; for Sam Fender, 73% of the Q1 chart units are physical and for Central Cee it was 25%.
Yet, looking down the chart after the top 10, it’s not until we get to number 89 that we get the next UK-signed act, the excellent Inhaler (note that the band are from the Republic of Ireland albeit signed in UK), who packed out 3 nights at Brixton but don’t break the quarter’s top 50. And to demonstrate how tough it is to convert popularity around a specific track to effect album chart position, Lola Young, who I’d argue has broken into wider cultural consciousness, charts at 178. This might be a chart rules issue; the charts measure an album by aggregating all the individual streams and then factor down the streams of the biggest track to the average of all the others (to prevent albums with one especially popular track biasing the popularity count). Meanwhile Lola plays Coachella, Parklife and Reading Festival.
In 2024, there were 14 new UK-signed albums in the top 200; this year, year-to-date there are 12. This marks a deterioration in the trend - although it’s the first quarter, so figures may improve as the year progresses and hopefully more new music is released. This was the contention of BPI when challenged about the 2024 data - that this is very much a cyclical issue with a lot of the UK’s benchmark artists not in promotional cycle. (12 out of 200 - 6%. Some cycle). One improvement is that there were 71 albums from British artists in the top 200, whereas only 63 made it over the course of 2024.
If there’s little new music in the first quarter chart, then it follows there’s a lot of older music being consumed. 56 of the top 100 most-consumed albums were released during or before 2021. 25 of the top 50 were released prior to 2021. That included 6 classic catalogue or greatest hits albums in the top 20. This tallies with the conclusion shared by Will Page at the recent FFWD conference in London, which he’d come to after looking at some data from Luminate, that most “new” music in the popularity rankings has been around for 4 or more years.
We see, yet again, both in how physical units have a particular weight and in how the chart rules count “an album”, that this popularity measure is driven by its own formulation. The other thing to consider is on demand plays as opposed to curated or automated streams. The chart’s purpose is to reflect popularity. If I pick up my phone and search for Inhaler and play a song or the whole album, that’s an on-demand stream. It is measurable (and is something that is measured by streaming services). If I pick up my phone and go to a playlist, or if at the end of that playlist it starts automatically selecting new songs (I find this infuriating and I turn it off but it keeps coming back on); or if I’ve asked my voice-activated speaker to play relaxing music and receive an algorithmic playback experience - those streams, also measurable in their distinctiveness form on-demand, have the same weight. This is despite me having no agency in their playback.
This issue with lean-back plays takes me back; twenty years ago I worked for an indie label and the Official Charts Company asked us to come and talk about the chart rules. There was a proposal to combine airplay and sales in the chart, the Billboard model at the time. The intention was to slow things down. Music that connected with the mainstream would be reflected across both media; a slower-moving chart suited major labels as they could work releases for longer at retail. The independents objected - major label leverage influenced airplay at the biggest stations, as did their A&R strategies; a chart that included airplay would bias against music from deeper pockets of culture, where an indie label could activate a fanbase to have a hit single or album even though the music wouldn’t be sonically palatable to daytime commercial radio. Yet this is the chart we have today, one where we mix demand-driven music consumption with passive music consumption. The effect is the same although it’s catalogue that benefits; the chart moves slowly as evergreen oldies are prioritised by streaming technologies with the sole purpose of driving listener retention through frictionless playback. We don’t know this, of course, as the deals are confidential, but we might speculate that the major labels could seek a degree of guaranteed exposure through automated playback in their negotiations, powering a return on their owned catalogue repertoire.
How can we truly know what’s popular in this context - and how can we create space for new music to emerge? Charts are still one of the key measures of success for record labels, despite these problems making them an unreliable barometer of true popularity. Incentives drive outcomes: streaming services lobby for inclusion in music charts, as they know it’s important to labels; their data, filtered through the chart’s rules (themselves created by the chart’s owners:
record labels, retailers and streaming services) create popularity rankings; record label executives optimise their actions for success through the chart mechanism.
I used to think that the weighting of physical music in the chart made no sense: one sale is equivalent to 1000 streams of an album’s tracks, which doesn’t seem like the same level of engagement - but I get it - when it’s so hard to get a new release into the chart, what else can you do? If the rules were different - if they optimised for true demand, or adjusted to give new music more space - then that would create different incentives which would influence upstream behaviour. A chart that favours some legacy acts through vinyl pre-order and others through automated playback on streaming services does nothing to assist the development of new music.