ON TOP! Taylor Swift tops charts as vinyl sales hit record high after 2 decades

Pop megastar Taylor Swift and the announcement of Oasis’s reunion tour further boosted demand for LPs, trade body the BPI revealed

A vinyl revival has helped sales of physical music rise for the first time in 20 years, with music icons such as Taylor Swift, Oasis and Charli XCX boosting numbers.

Pop megastar Taylor Swift and her latest album as well as the announcement of Oasis’s reunion tour further boosted demand for LPs, trade body the BPI revealed. The latest data saw the sales of vinyl albums jumped more than 9% to a 30-year high of 6.7 million in 2024.

While back catalogues continue to help drive the trend, an increasing number of artists are launching new music albums on vinyl too. They include Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, which sold more than 111,000 vinyl LPs, plus new albums by Billie Eilish (Hit Me Hard And Soft), Fontaines D.C. (Romance), The Cure (Songs Of A Lost World) and Charli XCX (Brat).

A 30th anniversary re-issue of Oasis’s iconic debut album Definitely Maybe was the second most popular vinyl LP of the year. Elsewhere, sales of CDs fell just 2.9%, having suffered hefty declines in previous years.

Together with demand for cassettes – which shifted around 100,000 this year – sales of physical music rose 1.4% across the year as a whole. But they were a drop in the ocean compared with streaming, with nearly 200 billion songs listened to on Spotify, Apple Music and the like this year.

It was also a landmark year for female artists. Women topped the Official Singles Chart for the majority – 34 – of weeks in 2024, and claimed half of the year’s Top 20 albums for the first time. Despite the success, the BPI has warned the industry facing a big threat from artificial intelligence and from proposed changes to copyright law that would give AI companies free access to music.

Dr Jo Twist, BPI chief executive, said: “We’ve seen another strong year benefitting from streaming and driven by era-defining women.”

She added: “The UK remains a world music power, but this status cannot be taken for granted: we need a supportive policy environment that puts the focus on human artistry and enables continued investment in the next generation of British talent.”