February 2026

UK Music Market 2025: Streaming Surges & Vinyl Resilience
BPI Annual Review: 210.3 billion streams, +4.3% album consumption, vinyl growth, and a breakout year for women artists.
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  On the last day of every year, the BPI (the British Phonographic Industry) publishes its annual review. While it's often an exercise in finding the positive out of a thin gruel of negativity, this year's trends in music are all up, but perhaps not in the way we expect.

The headline figure is that across sales and streaming in the UK, over 210.3 million albums were consumed last year; an increase of 4.3% on the previous year. Streaming now accounts for a whopping 89.3% of all music consumption, rising 5.5% year-on-year. That meant the UK market passed the 200 billion streams point for the first time, with 210.3 billion streams accumulated across 2025. Meanwhile, UK vinyl sales continue to increase, for the 18th consecutive year. However, the growth has slowed to just 1.4% over the previous year.

This was also a big year for women in music... and not just Taylor Swift. Olivia Dean, Skye Newman, Lola Young and more have all scored chart success, and not just in the UK. British artists like Sleep Token have scored No 1 chart successes in the US and UK in 2025.

The 210.3 million albums consumed in the UK during 2025 includes 'streamed equivalent' figures Streamed Equivalent Album (SEA) figures are a means of converting paid or free music streams into album-sale equivalents; hence the use of 'consumption' as opposed to sales. An 'Album Equivalent Unit' works out at 10 track downloads, 1,250 premium streams from paid services (such as Tidal or Apple Music), or 3,750 advert-supported streams (such as Spotify Free or YouTube). While this has been standard practice for more than a decade, the notion of buying a whole album does not sit right with some streaming fans.

It's also worth noting that the Taylor Swift effect is still a major component in music sales. Aside from being the first artist since ABBA to have biggest selling album in the UK for two consecutive years with two different albums, the impact of her The Life Of A Showgirl album represents a significant part of the total number of LPs sold.

The biggest selling LPs in the UK last year was a mix of old and new, with the Oasis tour sparking reissue success, and Manic Street Preachers new album doing well. However, of the old guard, only Rumours by Fleetwood Mac made the top 10.

hi-fi+ was saddened to learn of the passing of Paul Lee-Kemp, founder of the Sevenoaks audio retail store chain, and Jim Smith of Get Better Sound. Our thoughts go out to their families and friends.

Errata: In the last issue, we stated the incorrect price of the Hana Umami Black. The correct price is £7,995. Our apologies for the error and for any inconvenience caused.

Alan Sircom, Editor hi-fi+

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