Initial Research, Influences and Ideas: Music Industry

BBC 1 Top 10

Current Trends and Whats Selling Well

I looked at the BBC 1's top 10 charts and from that, I noticed that there is a variety of genres of music. They were all newly released singles. Some were from well known artists like Taylor Swift and The Script. The singles higher up in the charts have been in the charts for an average of 3 weeks, where as the one lower down have stayed for around 10 weeks like Nico & Vinz's 'Am I Wrong?'

Streaming music has been a big success to the music industry, because of streaming websites, the £1bn recorded music revenes in the UK in 2013 included £103m from just streaming subscriptions.
However this caused the sales of albums to fall. The overall value of album sales fell by 3.6% to £772.1m, single sales dipped 1.6% to 167.8m. This was the result of the 33.7% increase of subscription streaming  to £103m in 2013.

Gaps in the Market

In the music industry, there is a variety of artists. Many of the most successful ones are of the genres Pop and Rock, mainly male bands; these include One Direction, Arctic Monkeys, Maroon 5 and many more. The gap in the market would be female artists and indie artists.

Recently, Taylor Swift has been very successful with her music earning about $40,000,000 in 2013. Even now she's still hitting the charts with her new single 'Shake It Off'. Taylor Swift is not the only increasingly popular female artist, Meghan Trainor has suddenly become quite well known due to her song 'All About That Bass'.

As for indie artists, more and more people have started listening to them. 'Hipster' is a term used for the fans that listen to indie music and they tend to look for things that are trending or that will become a trend. An example of a recently uprising indie/acoustic artist is Passenger. After his release of 'Let Her Go', his musical talents have been recognised by others and his name has become more well known.

There are still many gaps in the market waiting to be filled but so far the ones that need to be filled are female indie/acoustic artists.