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Dance music continues to sell well, confirms BPI

By | Published on Thursday 4 July 2013

Daft Punk

Didn’t dance music get the memo, this was meant to be the year of the guitar band revival, remember? Yet sales of dance music singles were up nearly 20% in the first six months of 2013, while dance music albums were up nearly 34%.

Dance music accounted for one in six of the singles sold in the UK in the first half of this year, or 16.3% compared to 14.1% in the same period in 2012. It means EDM is now the third most popular genre behind pop and rock, though that’s a bit misleading given most pop music these days leans towards dance, and the lines drawn between a lot of pop, dance and R&B releases at the moment often seem arbitrary.

Releases from Rudimental, David Guetta, Armin Van Buuren, Disclosure, Duke Dumont, Calvin Harris and, of course, Daft Punk have all helped dance remain a strong genre in terms of record sales in the UK this year.

These stats were published today by record label trade body the BPI, where boss man Geoff Taylor said: “With so many memorable releases this year, not least Daft Punk’s iconic summer anthem, ‘Get Lucky’, dance music is well on its way to becoming one of the defining sounds of 2013. It’s drawing in artists normally associated with other genres, such as hip hop and dubstep. These fresh influences are giving 2013’s Dance music an edge which is really cutting through to fans”.

Meanwhile Ben Turner, co-founder of the newish Association For Electronic Music, told CMU: “The explosion of electronic dance music in the USA is well-documented worldwide, so it’s great for the UK to now be in a position to reveal statistics as strong as this to show how dance music continues to drive the British music business forward”.



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