
Recession? Not for Bieber. A new report from Informa’s Music & Copyright reveals that sales of pop music around the world increased 2.3% last year to a value of $7.5bn, and making up 31.9% of global music sales. We guess that’s why they call it pop. Total music sales, however, slipped 3.7% to $23.3bn and all other genres apart from pop suffered a fall in sales. Rap, R&B and hip-hop suffered a particularly sharp decline, allowing country music to slip into third position among the world’s biggest musical genres, behind pop and rock.