The UK ‘hit’ music industry is becoming an import market for US stars. - Music Business Worldwide

MBW Views is a series of exclusive op/eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following was written by Tim Ingham, founder and publisher of Music Business Worldwide. It first appeared in the new Q3 2024 edition of Music Business UK, MBW’s quarterly magazine dedicated to the UK music market, which is sent to MBW+ subscribers.

Something is going on.

As I write this, the entire Top Six of the Official UK Singles chart is comprised of US artists: Sabrina Carpenter (at No.1, No.2, and No.5), Chappell Roan at No.3, Linkin Park at No.4, and Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars at No.6.

The first British act to appear on the list is Chase & Status and Stormzy at No.7.

Now. I’ve written before in this column about the declining market share/importance of the UK Top 40 Chart more generally, as listening on streaming services becomes more fragmented across frontline ‘hits’, catalog music, and tens of millions of tracks with niche audience appeal.

Therefore, we should always remember that the Official Singles Chart (and the Billboard Hot 100 in the US) is a useful snapshot of only one part of the modern marketplace — the biggest blockbuster tracks of each week.

It’s far from a reflection of the entire music consumption market.

The UK’s Top 40 chart isn’t typically a great portrayal, for example, of the popularity of those tracks that continually rack up substantial-but-not-chart-bothering streams month after month.

(Two examples of this ‘hare and tortoise’ perspective: Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer and The Killers’ Mr. Brightside, which both sit stubbornly in the lower reaches of the UK chart each week, but over the course of years have proven to be more popular than most recorded music ever made.)

That all being true, one can’t help but be a little stunned by the US-centric nature of the upper reaches of the UK chart today.

Further evidence: in July, the Official Charts Company issued a list of the UK market’s most popular tracks across the first six months of 2024.

Not only were just four of the Top 20 tracks by UK artists but, of those four, two were heritage acts enjoying a ‘TikTok moment’ (Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Natasha Bedingfield). Of the other two, one was signed for records out of the US (Artemas, via Elliot Grainge’s 10K Projects).

Only Casso/RAYE/D-Block Europe’s Prada, at No.7, could be construed as a UK act signed out of Blighty.

(That said, Irish act Hozier, whose Too Sweet was at No.5 on the list, is signed to Island UK via Irish label Rubyworks.)

I point all of this out not to despair over the commercial limitations of UK talent.

For one thing there is a strong argument that across Artemas, Charli XCX, Myles Smith and others, British artists are actually enjoying a pretty good 2024 vs. other recent years in the international marketplace.

What’s particularly notable to me about the stats RE: UK acts on the UK chart in 2024 is that they sit so starkly in contrast with what’s going on elsewhere in the world.

The IFPI recently released a report measuring the presence of domestic artists amongst the Top 10 tracks of 2023 in multiple EU territories.

In Scandinavia, 90% of the year’s Top 10 was music from domestic artists; it was the same story in Italy. In Germany and France, it was 70%, while in some nations like Hungary and Greece, it was 100%.

Of course, these markets are naturally smaller importers of US pop music than the UK. The effect of local language tracks (especially in the hip-hop genre) is a major reason for this. The UK and US share a common(ish) language, which produces an obvious cultural impact.

Yet as music streaming reaches maturation, sensible questions need to be asked about whether the UK is happy to drift into becoming a heavy import market for North American hits or if changes are now required in the way Britain showcases – and numerically assesses – the success of its own talent.