UK recorded music revenues rose by 5% in 2025 to reach £1.57 billion, according to figures published today by record industry trade group BPI. It is the first time the market has exceeded £1.5 billion in annual revenue, and the eleventh consecutive year of growth, with the overall market growing slightly faster than it did in 2024.
The BPI’s figures represent wholesale revenue generated by recorded music - combining income from streaming, physical sales, digital downloads, synchronisation and public performance - rather than the retail value that consumers pay.
Revenue in 2025 was nearly 90% higher than a decade ago, according to the trade body - though that is before you adjust for inflation. In real terms the industry is still well short of where it was in 2006, the first year these figures included public performance and sync revenue. Adjusted for CPI, it would need to be hitting £1.95 billion to match that level; using RPI, £2.28 billion.
Despite that inflationary caution, BPI Chief Executive Jo Twist says there is “a resurgence in British music” and that its impact is “being felt not just at home but globally”. BPI Chair YolanDa Brown adds that the success “is being led by outstanding new talent drawn from across the UK”.
Artists from nine of the UK’s twelve nations and regions topped the Official Albums Chart in 2025, and UK acts were more visible in the Official Charts most-streamed tracks than they were in 2024, when not a single British artist made the top five.
In 2025, Lola Young’s ‘Messy’ was among the five tracks to exceed 150 million streams, and hits by Chrystal and Olivia Dean also made the top twenty. Dean and Young also both won Grammys in 2026.
Twist adds that the success is “a testament to our brilliant record labels” and that the UK’s “gold-standard copyright framework” remains essential - particularly as “a burgeoning market to license music to AI firms takes root”.
The BPI has been making the case for some time that any loosening of UK copyright law around AI training would put this kind of growth at risk - though how the major labels want to approach AI training, and how other sectors of the industry might want to approach it, remains a contentious issue.
Physical revenue was also up in 2025, with the annual figure topping £250 million “for the first time in eight years”, rising 12.8% to £278 million. Vinyl was the main driver, up 19.9% to £174.7 million - “its highest level in more than three decades”. CD revenue grew 3.1% to £99.6 million after a marginal decline the year before.
As in 2024, new releases continued to dominate the top end of the vinyl chart rather than catalogue reissues, with albums by Olivia Dean, Sabrina Carpenter and Sam Fender among the biggest sellers. Taylor Swift was vinyl’s biggest commercial story - ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ shifted more than 147,000 copies, “the most by any new album in a calendar year this century”.
In terms of catalogue releases, Oasis’s ‘Definitely Maybe’ and ‘(What's The Story) Morning Glory’ also featured in the top ten on the back of their reunion tour.
Sync revenue is not so positive, falling 10.8% to £39.2 million - a whole £4.7 million down from 2024’s £43.9 million, and erasing the 11.3% gain that we saw in 2024.
Streaming still accounts for 67.7% of total revenue, but the growth rate continues to decelerate - from 8.4% in 2023 to 5.7% in 2024 to 4.6% last year. Subscription revenue specifically rose just 3.1% to £902.2 million - below the ONS core CPIH annual inflation rate of 3.5% in December 2025, and despite two rounds of Spotify price rises in May 2024 and November 2025.
Ad-supported streaming tells a different story. Overall ad-supported revenue was up 13.9% to £163.4 million, but the more striking number is ad-supported audio streaming - stripping out video - which grew 21.8% to £97.2 million. Ad-supported audio went from around 7.8% of UK streaming revenue in 2024 to 9.1% in 2025. That is a disproportionate shift.
It is also one that does not obviously map onto Spotify’s own numbers. Globally, Spotify’s ad-supported revenue actually fell slightly in 2025, from €1.85 billion to €1.83 billion, dropping from 11.8% of total revenue to 10.7%. In Europe specifically, Spotify’s user base is moving in the opposite direction to the UK ad-supported trend.
Based on Spotify’s published regional splits, around 195 million of its 751 million global MAU at the end of 2025 were in Europe, of whom roughly 107 million were premium subscribers - meaning about 55% of European MAU are now paying. That is up from around 53% at the end of 2024. Spotify’s European audience is becoming more subscription-heavy, not less.
The UK's ad-supported audio growth could be coming from non-Spotify revenue - which most likely means YouTube Music ad-supported and other ad-funded services - which could represent a second wave of streaming growth as ad-supported picks up in new territories.
Alternatively, the surge in ad-supported revenue is potentially an area of concern, if this represents people switching to ad-supported services in the UK rather than stumping up for premium subscriptions. Of course, it could also represent entirely new users - younger users, for example, being driven into ad-supported audio from other consumption destinations, like TikTok.
This is a question that the BPI’s figures alone cannot answer - but either way, the subscription slowdown and ad-supported surge are worth watching closely as the market continues to evolve. It may be that we have more detailed insight on this when IFPI publishes its global stats next week.
