Streams, streams and more streams. The papers might be excited by the vinyl revival but make no mistake, the UK music biz’s second consecutive year of growth was built on the explosion in consumption at services such as Spotify and Apple Music.

That saw audio streams rise 67.5% on 2015 to 44.9 billion, with the first 1bn-stream week arriving in December. While actual album sales fell, Album Equivalent Sales (AES) were up 1.5% to 123.4 million. ERA figures show retail ...