We reported last week on industry body the BPI’s report that music consumption grew by 8.2% in the UK last year. Now we have some revenue figures to set alongside that, courtesy of the Entertainment Retailers Association (Era).
It claims that Brits spent £1.55bn on music across physical sales, download sales and streaming subscriptions in 2020, up by 6.8% year-on-year. It’s a deceleration of growth (from 7.1% in 2019) but given last year’s Covid-19 pandemic, that’s still a very impressive performance for the industry.
Streaming subscription spending grew by 15.5% to £1.21bn, accounting for 77.8% of the total. Note, this is spending, so a.) it includes the cut taken by DSPs, and b.) it does not include revenue from advertising on free streaming services.
Era noted that the music total is the highest since 2006, while the streaming revenue alone was “more than the entire music market was worth as recently as 2016”.
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