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…