The BPI's latest export figures make for a good news, cautious news story in equal measure. UK recorded music exports reached £800.3 million in 2025, the highest total since the trade body began measuring exports in 2020 and a rise of roughly 50% over five years. Look closer, though, and the growth rate has fallen every year since 2022: up 20% that year, 7.6% in 2023, 1.9% in 2024, and just 0.8% in 2025.
The names behind the headline number are familiar and new in equal measure. Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa remain the UK's biggest streaming exports, but the BPI points to a fresh wave of breakthrough acts — Olivia Dean, Lola Young, Sleep Token, PinkPantheress and YUNGBLUD among them — as the story most likely to shape next year's figures, since a new act's international streaming numbers tend to take a year or two to fully register in export data.
For a studio like ours, the relevant detail isn't the total, it's the direction of travel. The US remains the single biggest market for UK recorded music, taking around 40% of total exports, followed by Germany, France, Australia and Canada. That means a mix or master finished in a London studio is very rarely being judged against a UK-only bar. It's being compared, on the same streaming platforms and the same playlists, against records mastered in Los Angeles, Stockholm and Lagos.
Slowing growth alongside record highs usually points to the same underlying issue: more competition for the same attention. South Korea and other fast-growing markets are putting out more export-ready music than they were five years ago, and UK acts are competing globally earlier in their careers than before. That raises the bar for the finished audio itself — mastering that translates cleanly across club systems, AirPods and car speakers in a dozen different markets isn't a nice-to-have anymore, it's table stakes for an artist trying to break outside the UK.
The government's recently announced Music Growth Package, offering up to £30m of support over three years as part of the wider Creative Industries Sector Plan, is aimed at exactly this pressure point — helping British artists compete internationally earlier. Combined with established schemes like the Music Export Growth Scheme, there's real support available for independent artists thinking export-first from day one. Our advice to clients working towards an international release hasn't changed: build the export market into the brief from the first mixing session, not as an afterthought once a track has already found a UK audience.