An exceptional year: how Irish acts and the vinyl revival rewrote 2025
New industry figures show Irish artists surging to over a fifth of the top-selling acts, while vinyl sales jumped 20 percent. A closer look at the numbers behind a remarkable year for music in Ireland.
Every so often a set of industry figures lands that makes even a sceptic like me sit up. The latest report from the Irish music industry describes 2025 as an exceptional year for Irish acts at home and abroad, and for once the phrase does not feel like marketing. The numbers behind it tell a story that any music lover in this country will want to hear.
Irish artists take centre stage
The headline figure is genuinely striking. Tracks by Irish artists made up 21.5 per cent of the top 100 performers by sales in 2025, more than three times the share they held the year before. For a small country that has always punched above its weight in music, seeing that many of our own names crowd the upper reaches of the charts is a quietly emotional thing to read.
The vinyl revival is not a fad
Alongside that came the format that refuses to die. Vinyl sales jumped by 20 per cent, part of a wider global picture in which vinyl revenue rose 14 per cent over the same period. What began years ago as a niche for collectors has hardened into a genuine habit, with a new generation buying records for the ritual of placing a disc on a turntable and listening to a whole side.
Even cassettes came back
Perhaps the most surprising line in the report is that physical formats grew across the board. Compact discs rose by 4.5 per cent, and cassettes, of all things, climbed by an extraordinary 64 per cent. Nobody is pretending the humble tape is about to topple streaming, but its return says something about how listeners crave objects they can hold in an age when most music simply vanishes into the cloud.
Streaming still runs the show
None of this means the digital tide has turned. Ireland logged 13.2 billion audio streams last year, up 6 per cent on the previous year and a remarkable 60 per cent on 2020, while streaming now accounts for roughly 70 per cent of global music income. The healthiest reading of these figures is not vinyl versus streaming, but the two coexisting, each feeding a different kind of listening.
Why this matters to me
What moves me most is what sits underneath the statistics. A strong year for Irish acts means more artists able to keep making music, more small labels staying open and more young musicians daring to believe there is a path here at home. The formats will keep shifting, as they always have, but the appetite for Irish songs has rarely felt this alive, and that is worth celebrating.
