How The UK Consume Music

To find out more about the UK's music consumption, I looked over a quantitative report about
the music consumption patterns of UK households, written by the BPI in November 2011, which used a sample of 1000 UK music consumers of different ages, gender and household composition.

Figure 1

From figure 1 I could see that consumption of physical CDs and free copies of music is slowly suffering, in addition to this the more increasingly popular approaches to consuming music are all free: free downloads,  listening to the radio, free illegal streaming, internet radio and watching music videos on YouTube. However, legal and paid downloading and streaming of digital music has escalated due to the music industry's publicising of now well-known music stores and streamers like Deezer, Spotify, Shazam, Napster, eMusic, Lastfm, Soundcloud and BBC iPlayer Radio.

Yet looking below at the percentages in figure 1, I notice that the percentage of people who consume music through CDs is at 86%, which is the highest figure there.

Figure 2

Figure 2 demonstrates that younger age groups tend value music less, paying for an average of 38% of their music. Conversely, the older age groups prefer to pay for their music and own an average of 58% of their music share.

Figure 3 (Music Consumption by Age Group)

Figure 3 is taken from BPI's 2013 statistics. It shows that the music industry's main customer, who spend the most of their money on music than any other age group, are 13-24 year-olds.

Overall, from this information I've discovered that:

• Even though CDs dominate music consumption in the UK, it is declining
• Music is increasingly being downloaded illegally and also listened to for free on legal music streaming sites such as Youtube and internet radio stations, especially by younger age groups of people
• Paid music streaming sites are becoming more popular among the UK consumers
• 13-24 year-olds pay for music the most