This weekend’s Brit Awards are the British music industry’s annual showpiece, with performances from Raye, Harry Styles, Olivia Dean and Wolf Alice intended to show off the UK’s continued starmaking clout.
Ahead of that, Spotify is getting in on the positivity with the release of some stats from its annual Loud & Clear research, zeroing in on the UK.
The streaming service says that it paid out more than £860m of royalties for UK artists’ music in 2025 – up 6% year-on-year and more than double the total back in 2018.
More than 75% of those royalties came from listening outside the UK, and 45% were generated by independent artists or labels. Spotify also says that around 150 UK artists generated more than £1m of payouts last year; that the number generating more than £500k has more than doubled since 2018.
According to the DSP, UK artists accounted for more than a third of the tracks featuring in its UK daily top-50 chart in 2025 – up eight percentage points on 2024 – boosted by the fact that nearly 10,000 of them were added to its editorial playlists last year.
Finally, Spotify says that UK artists were discovered by first-time listeners more than 13bn times in 2025 on its service.
This mini-blizzard of stats is a carefully-crafted good-news story for the UK industry, which a year ago was suffering a major confidence wobble.
Brits were absent from the IFPI’s global top-10 singles and albums charts for 2024 – the first such wipeout since 2003 – while Luminate’s 2024 report showed the UK as the country suffering the biggest decline in its share of global premium streams that year.
A year later, the confidence is returning, and Spotify’s data-drop aims to signal-boost that. Ahead of its release, Music Ally talked to the company’s head of music, Europe, Andy Sloan-Vincent, to find out more – starting by digging into that ‘150 artists generating over £1m’ figure.
“These aren’t all just superstar pop stars. It’s folk singers who have small, targeted audiences. It’s feature artists on dance records. And also, 150 is the cut-off point we’ve chosen, but the 151st makes around £975,000, so it’s an arbitrary gap that we’ve put in. The pyramid runs really deep: £860m goes a long way,” he said.
“Also, it doesn’t feel like we’re building flash-in-the-pan artists. It feels like the artists are going to go on to be generational. They are multi-record artists already who are really finding their stride. They have put in their 10,000 hours, so I think it’s just really healthy.”
“The development stories are amazing. Olivia [Dean]’s been with her manager for 10 years. Lola [Young] has been signed for a very long time. Bands like Sleep Token, who are on their fourth record, are really blowing up,” he continued.
“It’s nice to see career artists hitting a peak of their career not on record one, even though I’m sure people would love it to be on record one. The fact that they’re going on to continuing heights really shows the power of finding new audiences globally.”
“We’ve seen a decline over the last couple of years in consumption of American music in the UK”
Andy sloan-vincent
Sloan-Vincent talked about this growth working across a range of genres – “Rock’s grown by 13% year-on-year” – as well as other diversity vectors. “We’re seeing more artists from more varied backgrounds and varied geographies within the UK.”
This is reflected in some of the listening data that Spotify is seeing in the UK too. One worry within the industry – not just in the UK, but in Australia too recently – has been over whether the nature of streaming in English-language markets favours the biggest American artists, who may then squeeze the share of local acts.
According to Sloan-Vincent, the opposite is true in the UK. “We’ve seen more British music being listened to. And actually a slight dip in US consumption… It’s actually pushing more towards UK this year.”
Later in the interview, he returned to this point. “Year-on-year, US consumption is diminishing in the UK. We’ve seen a decline over the last couple of years in consumption of American music in the UK.”
This isn’t purely about British artists’ increasing their share, noted Sloan-Vincent. It’s also about the growth for non-American, non-British artists – Bad Bunny being a prime example.
On a global level, though, Spotify says British artists are also finding new audiences in countries where English is not the main language – in contrast to the traditional export heartlands for UK artists.
“Typically in the past that would be US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Anglo markets. But what we’re seeing now is that while the US is still our biggest export partner, second is Germany, then Australia, and then Brazil and Mexico,” he said.
“British music is now carrying around the world into huge music markets – and markets that potentially weren’t very financially-exploited in the past. Brazil and Mexico weren’t particularly strong in terms of sales for the UK, but now we have strong subscription growth there, and we’re starting to see revenue from those markets flow back in.”
“There’s this great viral video that’s been kicking around: a bunch of these Indonesian nightclubs where they’re obsessed with Britpop. It’s basically kids, 18-25 year-olds, belting out the Stone Roses and launching pints in the air!” he added.
“The export story for us is monster, and we love it. We have teams internally that actively push British music out: a good, strong, healthy, human editorial team that are pushing out music daily to their compatriots around the world.”
That work will continue in 2026, with Sloan-Vincent hinting at some of Spotify’s activation plans in the UK.
“We think there’s a huge opportunity in connecting artists with fans. We think that could be tangible, more-real-world, more on-the-ground, seeing how artists engage people,” he said.
“You’ve seen it with us doing events over the last year with Lola and Olivia, where we did a dinner party for fans – these really nice, unique experiences only we can provide, because we have that level of fan data. We’re going to lean into that more over the summer, all across the UK.”
The interview finished with some thoughts about why the current crop of breakout British artists are doing so well. Sloan-Vincent suggested that it’s because “the context around artists is becoming more important again”.
“I think back to that point of being 13, 14 or 15 years old, and reading a magazine or listening to the radio or finding an artist you love, it’s because you see that they look a bit like you, or they dress like you wish you dressed, or they play the music that you love and it makes your friends excited,” he said.
“You find an affinity with these things, and I think that comes from context. Maybe there was a period when part of the reason we were maybe a little down on British music for a while was that the industry at large wasn’t telling these contextual stories,” he continued.
“So, having the context of artists; having artists with personality; having an industry that’s supporting these artists and wants to tell their stories and wants to fund them in the right way… that’s going to lead us to great success in the future. I think that’s going to be what builds the British music market up even further.”
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