Women performers have outshone their male counterparts in the music industry in the past year, with a record-breaking number of weeks at the top of the singles chart.
New research by trade organisation the BPI reveals that female artists spent 34 weeks in top spot on the list of hit songs, beating the previous record of 31 weeks, set the year before.
This means songs by women were at No.1 for the majority of the year.
Female performers also claimed half of the top 20 albums in the year for the first time, with huge success for artists including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX.
Women accounted for six of the top ten albums in the year, matching last year’s record, with Swift’s Tortured Poets Department in top place.
Her album had over 783,000 sales by the end of December, the most in a calendar year for any artist release since 2017. Swift had four of her albums in the top 20 for the year.
Women performers have outshone their male counterparts in the music industry in the past year, with a record-breaking number of weeks at the top of the singles chart; pictured Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter
New research by trade organisation the BPI reveals that female artists spent 34 weeks in top spot on the list of hit songs; pictured Billie Ellish and Charli XCX
Carpenter’s sixth studio album Short n’ Sweet was the third most popular. Three of her songs – Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste spent a combined 21 weeks at the top of the singles chart.
Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft was the fifth most popular album and Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was in sixth.
British singer Charli XCX was in eighth place with her album Brat, which received critical acclaim and spawned an entire ‘brat’ phenomenon, supposedly celebrating hedonism. Collins Dictionary chose ‘brat’ as its word of the year.
It was one of 12 albums by female solo acts or groups to top the Official Albums Chart during the year, equalling the most in any calendar year. Other acts to reach top spot included The Last Dinner Party, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande and Beyonce.
Fleetwood Mac also got a look in with their 50 Years – Don’t Stop the seventh most popular album.
The research said that women were responsible for a greater share of weekly top 10 tracks across the year than men. The BPI found that 44 per cent of these songs were attributable to men, while 47 per cent were credited to women.
But while it was a strong year for female performers it was Noah Kahan’s hit song Stick Season that topped the singles chart for the year, with another male singer Benson Boone in second with Beautiful Things.
The BPI’s research also showed that physical music sales showed positive year on year growth for the first time in two decades, driven by the 17th consecutive rise in vinyl album sales.
Female performers also claimed half of the top 20 albums in the year for the first time, with huge success for artists including Taylor Swift (pictured)
12 albums by female solo acts or groups topped the Official Albums Chart during the year, equalling the most in any calendar year. Other acts to reach top spot included Dua Lipa (L), Ariana Grande and Beyonce (R)
But while it was a strong year for female performers it was Noah Kahan’s (pictured) hit song Stick Season that topped the singles chart for the year
Vinyl is now at a three decade high with sales up 9.1 per cent to 6.7 million, with new releases increasingly fuelling this trend.
The BPI said seven of the top 10 vinyl LP sales were released in the calendar year, with Swift’s new album selling 111,000 on this format.
Buoyed by the publicity around their reunion, a 30th anniversary reissue of Oasis’ debut album Definitely Maybe was second most popular on vinyl, with other top sellers including The Cure, Charli XCX and Fontaines D.C.
The music trade body also reported signs of a ‘shoring up’ in the CD market, with purchases falling by 2.9 per cent as compared with a 19.4 per cent drop in 2022. Coldplay’s Moon Music was the top selling album in this format.
But the research revealed that UK artists were behind just nine of the top 40 tracks of 2024. The highest of these was Stargazing by Myles Smith in twelfth place. This compares with five years ago when 19 of the top 40 were British.
But the report said that more than 20 British groups and solo acts had topped the album charts during the year.
Overall the BPI said music consumption had risen by a tenth and the streaming market was up by 11 per cent.
The BPI’s chief executive, Dr Jo Twist, in announcing the figures, issued a warning about the threats posed to the music industry by artificial intelligence.
She said: ‘The UK’s creative output and human creativity is being placed at risk by proposed changes to British copyright law, which would allow international tech giants to train AI models on artists’ work without payment or permission, and would be the wrong way to realise the exciting potential of AI.’
Dr Jo Twist, chief executive of the BPI said: ‘We’ve seen another strong year benefitting from streaming and driven by era-defining women.’
She added: ‘From Coldplay, and Charli XCX, to The Last Dinner Party, and Myles Smith, there were plenty of examples of UK music success stories in 2024.’
The most popular music lists were compiled from Official Charts Company data. The BPI is a trade organisation for the UK recorded music business.
The popularity of songs in the music charts is calculated by analysing both sales and streaming activity.