Facts & Research

Looking back over the past 10 years, from when the iPod was still a new device for consumers, the speed of innovation has been dizzying. In that decade we have seen the entry of iTunes, YouTube and Spotify—not to mention the arrival of Twitter, smartphones and mass broadband. The music industry in the UK has embraced all of these changes, which has helped drive impressive growth in both revenues and the diversity of services in the market.

Key Findings

• There are now over 70 licensed music services in the UK, meeting a huge range of consumer needs.
• The introduction in 2012 of the Official Streaming Chart stands as an important marker of how far we have come in such a short period of time. It comes eight years after the first download chart and today downloads make up almost 100% of the singles chart.
• Of over 189 million singles sales in the UK in 2012, 99.6% were digital.
  There were 7.7 billion audio streams in the UK in 2012.
• 68% of people in the UK believe search engines should make it harder to find illegal music websites.

Source: British Recorded Music Industry (BPI)