Behind the Brits’ rock’n’roll glitter, it’s business as usual for the record labels

With the victors announced, the crowds dispersed and the queue for the toilets no longer snaking around the venue, the post-Brit awards hangovers are gradually diminishing in Manchester’s finest hotels. And the true winners are, as usual, the record labels.

“The labels get together, look at who’s the most unrecouped artist they’ve spent the most money on and not earned back then give them a Brit to boost the sales and help recoup,” says one former record label boss. “The profile for the labels is huge. The TV audiences may be going down, but you’ll know when they stop making money because the record labels will stop doing it. It costs an arm and a leg.”

The Brits themselves, the UK equivalent of the Grammys, have been an earner for the record labels that organise them since they were first broadcast in 1985. The Brits, the Mercury prize and the Official Charts Company are all owned and run by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), whose members are the UK’s record labels and which is dominated by the big three labels: Universal, Sony and Warner. Each year one major label – this year it was Sony – leads a committee of record labels and BPI representatives. It oversees Brit Awards Limited, effectively a BPI subsidiary, which technically runs the event.

Despite a turnover of £13m, Brit Awards Limited fell into the red for the first time in 2024, reporting a pre-tax loss of £12,653 due to “a different mix of partnerships” for the annual event, according to the company accounts. This may have prompted the industry to move the event from the O2 Arena in London to the cheaper Co-op Live arena in Manchester.

The award nominees and winners are decided by the Brit Awards Voting Academy of about 1,200 voters. Record labels have 381 votes, the largest bloc ahead of the press, which has 345, managers with 86, trade associations with 78 and on down to the smallest group, social media influencers, with 20 votes. The BPI controls the criteria for nominations using chart performance as a guide.

“Winning an award is great business for the label, which takes most of the resulting boost in streaming revenue,” the former label boss explains. “The best way an artist can earn is to perform live and hopefully sell more tickets on their next tour.”

“It definitely feels like an industry work do,” says music journalist and broadcaster Pete Paphides, who has covered the Brits several times. “It felt like if the cards had fallen differently, I’d have the same experience covering a car industry award show, as it’s such a boilerplate experience. They even talk through the performances. Then there’s the TV audience, who see a whole different event thanks to the cameras.”

While the TV audience has been drifting down from 6.2 million in 2012, reaching 2.5 million in 2024 and 2025, this year has seen the show streamed live on YouTube for the first time as the BPI, which represents record labels, tries to address the UK music industry’s increasingly vulnerable place on the global stage. In the days immediately after the 2025 show, the Brits reported nearly 70 million views across all social channels, an increase of 45% from 2024.

Last August the BPI reported that the UK’s share of global music consumption had fallen from 17% in 2015 to about 8-9% in 2025, with no British artists in Spotify’s global Top 10 most streamed. The proliferation of K-pop and Latin American artists in international markets is dialling up the competition for UK labels especially.

Photograph by JMEnternational/Getty Images