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Nostalgia surrounding the Oasis reunion tour, alongside Taylor Swift fans’ clamour for vinyl, contributed to another boom year for the UK music industry, as physical formats continued their comeback.
Music lovers listened to the equivalent of 210.3m albums by UK artists during 2025, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) annual report, up 4.9% on 2024 and the 11th year of growth in a row.
Female pop artists and touring middle-aged male rockers led the way in the charts, while sales were further bolstered by Britain’s enduring love affair with the British-American band Fleetwood Mac.
The BPI rates the success of the UK’s music industry by using a measure called “album equivalent sales”, to arrive at an estimate that seeks to compare streaming consumption with digital and physical sales.
On that basis, the fastest-growing formats were all physical, continuing a trend that began last year when a 20-year decline finally reversed.
Vinyl still makes up a relatively small proportion of total consumption: 7.6m albums compared with 189m “streaming equivalent albums”.
But record sales grew by 13.3%, the 18th consecutive year of growth and far ahead of the 5.5% increase registered by streaming.
Fans of Taylor Swift, known as “Swifties”, helped propel her 2025 release The Life of a Showgirl to 147,000 vinyl units – the most sold by anyone since the Official Charts Company began compiling the charts in the 1990s.
It is the fourth successive year in which Swift has been the top annual vinyl seller, after Midnights in 2022, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) in 2023 and The Tortured Poets Department in 2024.
Despite a Christmas “retro renaissance” among younger so-called gen Z listeners, CD sales still declined by 7.6% to 9.7m, indicating that the format’s resurgence may have been overplayed.
But an expanding interest in cassette tapes led to almost 80% growth in the “other” category, albeit to a relatively paltry 330,000. Overall, physical album sales were up by 1.4% to 17.6m.
While Swifties piled into vinyl, sellout tours by Oasis and Coldplay helped catapult both acts back into the overall album charts, which are weighted towards digital streaming.
The 2010 Oasis compilation Time Flies … 1994-2009 returned to No 1 after the tour’s launch, hit the top spot again in August and finished the year in fourth, with the 1995 album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory in seventh.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet was the second-biggest-selling album of the year behind The Life of a Showgirl, followed by Ed Sheeran’s +-=÷x (Tour Collection).
Fleetwood Mac’s 50 Years – Don’t Stop, released in 2018, came in fifth. Their fan-favourite album Rumours, released half a century earlier in 1977 and one of the bestselling albums of all time, was seventh in the vinyl charts.
The BPI also hailed breakthroughs by newer acts such as Olivia Dean, Lola Young, Sleep Token, PinkPantheress and Skye Newman, as well as the 2025 Mercury prize winner, Sam Fender.
Jo Twist, the chief executive of the BPI, called on the government to ensure that the industry was protected by upholding copyright law, amid mounting concern about the effect of AI on artists.
Twist said the figures “should be a powerful reminder that British music is a global headline act, and one of the crown jewels of the UK’s creative industries. Ensuring its success should be high on the government’s agenda in 2026.
“We need the commitment of policymakers, the continued protection of the UK’s gold-standard copyright framework, and a business environment which supports direct licensing between music and tech companies in order for labels to continue to discover, nurture and promote the global stars of tomorrow.”
