Overall Market

Luis Fonsi’s Despacito may have been the biggest song of the quarter, but ‘a little slowly’ is no longer an adequate description of the music industry’s return to growth.

Indeed, the sales boost which has so cheered the biz after 15-odd years of solid decline has done anything but slow down. Q2 showed Album Equivalent Sales (AES) leap by an impressive 12.5%.

That marks an acceleration on even Q1, when the peak weeks of Ed Sheeran’s all-conquering ÷ album ...