This year was the first time that streams were included alongside downloads and physical sales in the Official Top 40 charts. Revenue from streaming in Britain this year was up 65% to £175m – overtaking revenue from single sales and downloads for the first time. The figures disclosed that the number of tracks streamed in Britain doubled in 2014, up from 7.5bn in 2013 to 14.8bn in 2014.
The changing shape of the music industry was also underlined by the growing importance of streaming. There were 29.7m albums downloaded in 2014, down 9% on the year before, while 52.7m CDs were bought – a drop of almost 7%. “Our record labels are backing home-grown talent like Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and George Ezra, who in turn are catching fire around the world.”īut the success of individual artists was not enough to compensate for the continued decline in album sales overall, further confirming the predictions of industry pundits and even the head of music at Radio One, George Ergatoudis, that the format is heading towards extinction. Commenting on the notably strong year for British music, Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and Brit awards, described the success as remarkable and said the business was postitioned to expand further this year.
This is the 10th year in a row that a British artist has topped the annual UK album bestsellers chart, following on from One Direction in 2013. The only female artist to make it into the chart was the pop-soul singer Paloma Faith, with her album A Perfect Contradiction. Pink Floyd’s Endless River, the band’s first studio album in 20 years, also made it into the top 10. Here are the 50 records that defined our year.Sheeran was closely followed by the multi-award-winning debut from Sam Smith, In the Lonely Hour, which shifted 1.25m copies, while other big sellers of 2014 included George Ezra’s first album in third, Paolo Nutini, Coldplay and One Direction. R&B innovators like the Weeknd and Miguel walked a reverb-saturated lane into the future and past, while rappers like Drake, Future and Rae Sremmrurd brought cohesive, immediate statements for the Internet's insatiable now. This year saw some fantastic releases from Rock & Roll Hall of Famers (Keith Richards, Don Henley, Darlene Love), along with a few strong returns from the alt-rock heroes of the Nineties (Blur, Sleater-Kinney, Wilco). Over on the pop charts, Halsey celebrated the "New Americana" (rhymes with "Biggie and Nirvana"), and some of 2015's best albums upended the old one: Upstart Chris Stapleton sang country songs like Sam Cooke, Jason Isbell made roots-rock that shouts out Sylvia Plath, and both Rhiannon Giddens and Bob Dylan took turns running the American songbook through their unique prisms. Kendrick Lamar's Molotov-cocktail-tossing hip-hop, D'Angelo’s razor-sharp R&B and Kamasi Washington's restorative jazz all made major statements, feeling like three crucial dispatches from the #BlackLivesMatter protests under three black-and-white covers.
As the curtain falls on 2015, it might be hard to remember any albums released this year besides Adele's record-breaking, generation-uniting, triple-platinum-and-counting 25.
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