Royal Males

It is officially the era of the male solo artist, with the BPI’s artist gender survey (yes such a thing exists) revealing that British male solo artists enjoyed their strongest UK sales share in over 15 years in 2014.

The gender-based artist analysis looked at the top 1,000 best-selling artist albums in the UK, going back to the year 2000. “Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown?” .

The new stats are included in the BPI’s new Music Market 2015 report, revealing that your Sheerans, Smiths and Ezras contributed to male solo artists taking a 38.2% share of sales, shifting almost four albums out of every ten.

The Gen can hear you crying out for context so please, allow the BPI’s Gennaro Castaldo to comment: “After years of dominance by Rock and Pop Groups as well as a more recent spell at the top by Female Solo Artists, the amazing success of male solo artists in 2013 and 2014 led by Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and George Ezra (pictured) is helping to reshape the music landscape”.

Castaldo continued: “You’d probably have to go back to the days when Robbie and George Michael were regularly topping the Official Charts in the Nineties and then further back to the Fifties era of the Crooners to find a time when Male Solo Artists so dominated the music scene”.

Of course, there is no way at all that culture is regressing back to the days of TFI Friday.

Such sales stats may go towards explaining why there is currently so much legitimate chatter around festival line-ups being male dominated with broadsheet newspapers doing clever things like removing all of the male names from line-up posters and revealing what remains.

In related news, it has been announced this week that Ed Sheeran’s ‘Thinking out Loud’ has become the first single to spend an entire year in the UK Top 40.