Female artists had a record year on the UK singles chart, spending the most weeks at number one since records began in 1952. Miley Cyrus had the biggest song of the year, with the break-up anthem Flowers attracting 198 million streams. However, new music was largely absent from the year's top 10 best-selling albums. The Weeknd's greatest hits compilation The Highlights was at number one, with Taylor Swift's 2022 album Midnights in second place.
New records by Lewis Capaldi, Olivia Rodrigo, and Ed Sheeran were all outsold by "best of" collections from Elton John, Eminem, Fleetwood Mac, and Abba. The only new release in the top 10 was Taylor Swift's 1989 (Taylor's Version), but even that was a re-recorded and repackaged version of an album from 2014. The pattern was repeated, to a lesser extent, in the singles chart, with throwback hits like The Killers' Mr Brightside and Tom Odell's Another Love nestling alongside newer tracks by Calvin Harris, SZA, and Harry Styles.
According to data from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Miley Cyrus's Flowers was the only song released in 2023 to be certified double platinum, racked up 1.2 million "chart units." In the albums market, none of the year's new releases were popular enough to be awarded a platinum disc, representing 300,000 sales. Music writer Patrick Clifton recently identified statistics like these as adding up to a "crisis" for the British music industry.
The so-called "long tail" effect also means that older songs will continue to generate streams after their initial chart run. Nine hits from 2022 racked up their millionth "sale" in 2023, including Eliza Rose's dance anthem BOTA (Baddest Of Them All), George Ezra's Green, Green Grass, and Sam Smith's duet with Kim Petras, Unholy.
One interesting side-effect of the shift in music habits is that the vinyl charts - once the preserve of collectible classics - now seem more up-to-date than the main album countdown. Seven of the top 10 vinyl albums were new releases, with Taylor Swift's 1989 being the best-seller. New music from Olivia Rodrigo, Blur, and Lewis Capaldi also made the top 10, alongside the perennial best-sellers Rumours, by Fleetwood Mac, and The Dark Side Of The Moon, by Pink Floyd.
Overall, demand for music continued to grow, with a record 179.6 billion songs streamed in the UK. The BPI said 2023 was a "landmark" year for women, with seven of the top 10 best-selling songs featuring female acts.
