Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift and Charli XCX helped boost the UK economy by a whopping £8Billion in 2024 it’s been revealed.
The Levitating singer, 30, led the charge with smash hit album Radical Optimism topping the charts before her world tour helped skyrocket export revenues.
Taylor’s Eras tour was another huge money maker after £1.2Million fans attended her 15 concerts, in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, and London.
Elsewhere Charli’s album Brat which became a cultural phenomenon last year, was another money spinner with the industry seeing £1.5B being made from downloads, streaming and physical record sales.
As a result 4,000 new jobs were added, meaning there were now 220,000 full time musicians, composers, songwriters, producers and engineers working in the UK.
Despite Take That, Bruce Springsteen and Liam Gallagher’s Tour’s also helping make the country a mint, UK Music’s Chief Executive Tom Kiehl warned about the dangers facing the industry, including artificial intelligence.
Dua Lipa (pictured) Taylor Swift and Charli XCX helped boost the UK economy by a whopping £8Billion in 2024
Taylor’s Eras tour was another huge money maker after £1.2Million UK fans attended her 15 shows, in Edinburgh , Liverpool, Cardiff, and London
Charli’s album Brat which became a cultural phenomenon, was another money spinner with the industry seeing £1.5B being made from downloads, streaming and physical record sales
He said: ‘While it is brilliant news that the government now acknowledges music as a high-growth sub-sector, ultimately the government needs to be judged in terms of the progress it makes in regulating artificial intelligence and unlocking EU touring. The status quo on these two big issues is currently tilted against music’s interests.’
Earlier this year Sir Elton John and Simon Cowell called on ministers to rethink their radical proposals to relax copyright rules in a bid to stop AI plundering Britain’s creative genius.
The two global megastars fear the next big acts will not be able to break through should the Government go ahead with plans to hand a copyright exemption to Big Tech firms.
They warned the plans risked destroying the UK’s world-renowned £126 billion creative industries – and many thousands of jobs at the same time.
Ministers are proposing to change existing laws so that the tech giants can use any online material, such as text, images or music, to improve their Artificial Intelligence models – without respecting the copyright laws that ensure creators get paid.
Instead, creators would have to ‘opt out’ of having their work exploited in this way.
But many in the worlds of music, film, media, the Arts and publishing fear that this could have a ruinous effect on a sector that employs 2.4 million people – with American technology billionaires the likely beneficiaries.
It could also threaten Britain’s free Press, with journalistic content taken from newspaper websites without recompense.
Dua led the charge with her smash hit album Radical Optimism topping the charts before her world tour helped skyrocket export revenues.
Despite Take That, Bruce Springsteen and Liam Gallagher’s Tour also making a mint, UK Music’s Chief Executive Tom Kiehl warned about the dangers facing the industry
Yesterday the Mail launched a campaign calling on Keir Starmer’s Government to urgently change course.
In an impassioned plea, Sir Elton said the proposals ‘would devastate our creative community’ only to ‘help powerful foreign technology companies make profits’.
He warned it would ‘destroy the UK’s leadership’ as a cultural superpower and ‘give it all away. For nothing’.
Sir Elton said: ‘The UK’s creative sector is the envy of the world, but we only achieved that success with the backing of our long-standing copyright protection – the world’s gold standard. And it’s paid off: Our creative industries drive economic growth and create jobs for the UK, as well as fuelling our ongoing leadership in world affairs.
‘We all recognise and embrace the fact that generative AI technology offers some incredible opportunities for us all. This is not new. The music community has always been quick to adopt new technologies.
‘We must respect creators’ rights, deliver great experiences for fans and offer new and young artists even brighter opportunities. But adoption of this copyright exception would destroy the UK’s leadership that has been hard won, and what’s worse, it would give it all away. For nothing.’
X Factor creator Cowell said the issue was ‘potentially one of the biggest moments and decisions of our time’.
Writing in the Mail, he warned that the livelihoods of artists and those who worked behind the scenes risked ‘being wiped out’ if AI was not managed and regulated properly.
‘The thought that anyone would believe they have the right to blindly give this country’s creative ideas away – for nothing – is just wrong,’ he said. ‘I passionately care about people’s personal creativity – and AI shouldn’t be able to steal the talent of those humans who created the magic in the first place.’
Cowell and Sir Elton are the latest cultural powerhouses to join the Mail’s fight after the bosses of Sony Music Group, Warner Music and Universal Music Group all backed our campaign.