Individual Research- Current Music Trends & Best Sellers

Source: officialcharts.com

If you look at the top 20 best selling singles of 2014 (left), you can see that the majority of these tracks are from the Pop, R&B or Indie genres. "Happy" by Pharrell Williams coming top of the list, which conforms very heavily to the conventions of a Pop track. Out of these three genres of music, none stand out as being most prominent, but in fact seem to be equally distributed amongst the top 20 listings.

Source: Wikipedia

By searching for a year by year account of the top selling single, it becomes very clear that over the last decade, pop singles appear to be the public's preferred choice. Nearly all of the artists behind the singles have very strong British/American Identities, with the exception of the 2012 hit "Somebody That I Used To Know" by Gotye and Kimbra, both of whom have Australian origins.

Over the last 4 years, it is plain to see that while the % sales of each individual genre have varied slightly year on year, the top 4 genres: Pop, Rock, Dance and R&B have remained in the same position, making up the majority of sales and streaming within the UK market. By combining both unit sales and streaming, you get a general idea of which genres are currently favored by UK audiences. As of the end of 2013, it stands that Pop is the most popular genre with 35.1% of the UK market,  Rock following behind by 12% at 23.1%, followed by Dance and R&B respectively.

Itunes Pop Chart

                

               Itunes Rock Chart

Itunes R&B Chart

                  

In both the "Rock" and "R&B" charts, certain artists appear within the top regions of the charts multiple times with various songs from the same album. This tells me that many of those who listen to these genres tend to stick to a particular artist and will spend their money and time on singles and albums released by them.

The Pop chart is the exception to this with only The Script appearing in the charts twice, but for songs from different albums. This may be due to the an over saturation withing the Pop genre, especially with the rise in popularity of talent shows like "The X Factor" and "The Voice" constantly producing a new influx of "Pop" singers into the market.