Music fans in the UK spent more on recorded music in 2024 than ever before, new figures show www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg7rl3z3jmzo

Well, sort of

It's interesting but does this include sales from indie record shops who sell new and old. The local or small venues who have bands who sell their CDs at small venues from a suitcase or the second hand market on eBay?

It's a bit of a smoke and mirrors claim isn't it. The second best selling vinyl album of last year was relased 30 years ago, and the second best selling album overall was a 3 year old release, and there are other similar examples in those top tens of last year.

We also need a desperate recovery in the quality of recorded music and a bigger diversity of appealing mass music too. What has happened to great groups, where are new ones, and what has happened to rock music, why is that not selling like it used to, there were always great rock tracks in the mainstream singles charts. Now all I see is a glut of indentikit female singers with unremarkable unoriginal voices, and men who look like a doorway busker warbling on. Where is the glamour of rock and pop, the creativity and sparkle to excite, and truly memorable mass appeal new tunes that pass what was once called "the old grey whistle test".

We keep hearing how massive Taylor Swift is but the item says she had the biggest selling album last year (what an awful album title it is) but it only shifted less than 800,000 copies, yet in 1997 an Oasis album, Be Here Now, shifted nearly that amount inside one week on debut release.

Music and charts mean nothing to a 16 year old family member of mine. Yet at his age it was everything to me and those around me and it all felt genuinely very important, and remains so in my fifties to this day. The older ones are making some of the best new music now, not the younger generation.

Also there's a problem with narrow minded people who will only listen to one genre and nothing else. How sad is that.

When I see young people with headphones on in coffee shops. You think they are listening to music they are watching crap on Youtube or playing a mobile app.

I remember being a youth spending money in record shops and getting what I could afford at the time.

I love rummaging through charity shops, most is crap but you can find gems. Second hand vinyl in shops are becoming non-existent. Staff get first dibbings.

Taylor Swift has numerous releases of the same album out but each one has a different bonus track. Make the album a fucking double album. Remember those and I don't mean The White Album.