Female artists including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa outshine male stars as they hold record-breaking number of weeks in the singles chart
Female artists have surpassed their male counterparts in the music industry over the past year, spending a record number of weeks at the top of the charts.
New research from industry body BPI shows that female artists topped the charts for 34 weeks, beating the previous record of 31 weeks set the year before.
This means that songs by women were number 1 for most of the year.
Female artists also claimed half of the year’s top 20 albums for the first time, with huge success for artists like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX.
Women accounted for six of the year’s top ten albums, equaling last year’s record, with Swift’s Tortured Poets Department taking the top spot.
By the end of December, her album had sold more than 783,000 copies, 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.
Female artists have surpassed their male counterparts in the music industry over the past year, spending a record number of weeks at the top of the charts; pictured Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter
New research from industry body BPI shows that female artists topped the hit list for 34 weeks; 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 topped the singles chart for a combined 21 weeks.
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 sixth.
British singer Charli Collins Dictionary chose ‘brat’ as its word of the year.
It was one of twelve albums by female solo acts or groups to top the official album chart during the year, equaling the most in any calendar year. Other acts to reach the top spot included The Last Dinner Party, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande and Beyonce.
Fleetwood Mac also got a look with their 50 Years – Don’t Stop, the seventh most popular album.
The research found that women were responsible for a greater share of the weekly top 10 songs than men throughout the year. The BPI found that 44 percent of these songs could be attributed to men, while 47 percent were attributed to women.
But while it was a strong year for female artists, it was Noah Kahan’s hit Stick Season that topped the charts this year, with another male singer, Benson Boone, in second place with Beautiful Things.
The BPI research also found that physical music sales showed positive year-on-year growth for the first time in two decades, driven by the 17th consecutive increase in vinyl album sales.
Female artists also claimed half of the year’s top 20 albums for the first time, with huge success for artists like Taylor Swift (pictured)
Twelve albums by female solo acts or groups topped the official album chart during the year, equaling the most in any calendar year. Other acts that reached the top spot included Dua Lipa (L), Ariana Grande and Beyonce (R)
But while it was a strong year for female artists, it was Noah Kahan’s hit Stick Season (pictured) that topped the singles chart this year.
Vinyl is now at its highest level in the last thirty years, with sales up 9.1 percent to 6.7 million, with new releases increasingly fueling the trend.
The BPI said seven of the top ten best-selling vinyl LPs were released in the calendar year, while Swift’s new album sold 111,000 copies in the format.
Buoyed by the publicity surrounding their reunion, a 30th anniversary reissue of Oasis’ debut album ‘Definitive Maybe’ was the second most popular on vinyl, alongside other top sellers such as The Cure, Charli XCX and Fontaines DC.
The music trade body also reported signs of ‘support’ in the CD market, with purchases falling 2.9 per cent, compared with a 19.4 per cent decline in 2022. Coldplay’s Moon Music was the best-selling album in the format .
But the research found that British artists were behind only nine of the top 40 songs of 2024. The highest of these was Myles Smith’s Stargazing in twelfth place. This compares with five years ago, when 19 of the top 40 were British.
But the report said more than 20 British groups and solo acts topped the album charts during the year.
Overall, the BPI said music consumption was up by a tenth and the streaming market was up 11 percent.
The CEO of the BPI, Dr Jo Twist, warned about the threats that artificial intelligence poses to the music industry when the figures were announced.
She said: ‘Britain’s creative output and human creativity are being put at risk by proposed changes to UK copyright law, which would allow international tech giants to train AI models on artists’ work without payment or permission, and that would be the wrong way to do it. Realize the exciting potential of AI.”
Dr. Jo Twist, CEO of the BPI, said: ‘We’ve seen another strong year, benefiting from streaming and powered 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 success stories in British music in 2024.’
The most popular music charts are compiled based on data from Official Charts Company. The BPI is a trade body for the British music industry.
The popularity of songs in the charts is calculated by analyzing both sales and streaming activity.