For decades, Britain has traditionally punched massively above its weight when it comes to pop music: we’re so used to providing the world with huge stars that the sight of a list of global bestselling albums and singles that doesn’t contain a single UK artist comes as a jolt. The industry body IFPI has published its figures for 2024, and these charts are populated solely by American and South Korean artists.
It tells you something about a market dramatically opened up by the rise of social media and streaming, which made music from outside the old Anglo-American pop axis more accessible and appealing. Four of the 10 biggest-selling albums of 2024 come from South Korea, a country that continues to exceed expectations, with 17m fewer people than the UK. It has proved infinitely more adept at marketing manufactured pop than Britain or the US in recent years, with K-pop fans actually spending money on albums: when you remove streaming from the equation and look at pure sales, 17 of the top 20 biggest global sellers are South Korean. Sales are helped along by fan-baiting multiple editions – Seventeen’s two charting albums had 12 different versions between them – though Taylor Swift was the canniest in this regard: she released a total of 36 versions (19 of them physical editions) of The Tortured Poets Department, which duly tops the global album list.
The trend for country or vaguely country-influenced pop over the last 12 months means that traditional Nashville star Morgan Wallen is in both charts, as is Noah Kahan, whose woody singer-songwriter strains are distantly related to country. It’s a trend that militates against British artists; we’re good at many things, but country is not traditionally our forte.
Furthermore, it perhaps says something about the fact that Britain hasn’t produced a new mainstream pop star striking or original enough to compete outside the confines of their homeland for several years. The highest-placed UK artist on IFPI’s global singles chart, at No 15, was Artemas with I Like the Way You Kiss Me, though nothing on his mix tape Yustyna came close to its success and perhaps his style is too jaded to significantly cross over: his most recent song was named after a porn site. But Raye’s next album could capitalise on the critical acclaim afforded her debut in the US, while Lola Young, whose UK No 1 single Messy is currently outstreaming hits by Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter globally on Spotify, could be another bright prospect.
And in fairness, the IFPI list isn’t the full story. The absence of British names perhaps says less about a paucity of homegrown stars than the fact that some of the country’s biggest artists – Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi among them – are either on hiatus from releasing new music, or in the process of working on it. Meanwhile, you could hardly accuse Charli xcx’s Brat of being an album that landed with insufficient impact, even if its sales weren’t enough to elevate it into the year’s Top 10 biggest sellers: Kamala Harris’s campaign team changed the theme of its social media accounts to mirror that of the album after the singer endorsed the presidential candidate. Outside the period covered by the list, Central Cee’s debut album Can’t Rush Greatness entered the US charts at No 9: nothing to give Kendrick Lamar sleepless nights, but an achievement so extraordinary, given America’s traditional resistance to rap artists from outside its borders, that it would have seemed completely unimaginable even a few years ago.
Tellingly, both Charli xcx and Central Cee have taken a long time to reach their commercial zenith: Brat is the former’s sixth album, Can’t Rush Greatness arrived nearly eight years after the latter’s debut EP. There’s a lesson about allowing artists to develop, rather than expecting immediate results, which perhaps the British music industry has heeded. After a period in which major labels would apparently alight on anything that had gone viral on social media, which yielded short-term success but little longevity (you may recall their brief faith in the questionable notion that sea shanties were very much the coming thing in 2020), they’re currently claiming to set great store in taking a longer view when it comes to what they sign. It’s the right thing to do: we’ll have to wait to see if it yields results.
