Current Trends in Popular Music & What Is Selling Well

The Official UK Top 40 Singles Chart September 2014

Firstly looking at the UK charts, I could see a range of different music, varying in genre and audience. A common trait in the majority of the singles is that they are all fairly new and released within this year, furthermore most of the older tracks, which are around 30 weeks old, are farther down the list and keep dropping, whereas the newer songs tend to be at the top.

The genre varies from dance (David Guetta - Lovers On The Sun), indie (Riptide - Vance Joy), RnB (Iggy Azalea - Black Widow) and pop (Taylor Swift - Shake It Off). This shows the UK music consumers' diverse taste in music.

Album sales by genre (BPI, 2013)

Using facts from BPI's 2013 statistics, I found that the most bought music genres are rock and pop both dominating by around 30% each, then followed by other music genres like dance (8.3%), MOR/easy (8.1%) and R&B (5.7%) with much lower percentages.

Singles sales by genre (BPI, 2013)

However with singles, as opposed to albums, pop-genre music has predominated the charts every year from 2009, well above rock music.