Current Trends in Popular Music

UK music consumers, on the whole, have quite a varied taste in music. The image below is from the Official Chart Companies UK Top 40 and proves just that. Many music genres are represented including Pop (Taylor Swift, Magic), Indie/Acoustic (George Ezra, Ed Sheeran), Soul (Sam Smith, Ella Henderson) and Dance/Urban (Lethal Bizzle, Iggy Azalea). This shows that a wide range of genres are trending with UK consumers and therefore a variety of artists can be marketed at UK audience.

Current UK Top 40

The Digital UK Top 40 Chart is almost identical showing that UK audiences consume music in both traditional (CDs, buying albums, Vinyls) and non-traditional ways (Downloading, iTunes, Spotify). This is also reflected on sites such as youtube:

George Ezra's music video for 'Budapest' has had over 10 million views with almost 70,000 likes.

Taylor Swift's latest video for her song 'Shake It Off' went viral almost as soon as it came out and now has over 84 million views

The interactivity and shareability of the content on sites such as youtube, allows audiences to interact with music in new ways online. It has allowed videos to go viral and be consumed by more people than they would have using traditional methods.

Album Sales by Genre (BPI, 2013)

Single Sales by Genre (BPI, 2013)

BPI's facts and figures show that over the past four years, Pop and Rock have been the UK's most popular genres with Rock dominating last year grossing 33.8% of album sales. However, if you look at the singles sales Pop dominates. This informs us about audience consumption habits: Rock music consumers tend to buy whole albums whereas Pop music consumers prefer to purchase singles. For example The Arctic Monkeys album 'AM' was no.1 in the UK album charts but it's most popular single 'Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?' only charted at no.8 on the UK Singles charts.