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Yearbook Introduction

UK Market Statistics

Entertainment meets its annus horribilis

By Steve Redmond and Luke Butler

Even in the darkest days there's a chink of light and so it was in 2012, a true annus horribilis for the entertainment retailing market.

Video sales declined by £179m, games by an horrific £336m and music by £59m, yet entertainment retailers, long accustomed to threats as varied as piracy, rampant price competition and sometimes remarkably indifferent suppliers, showed their ability once again to react to market conditions.

In 2011, music became the first of entertainment's three sectors to become a majority online business. In 2012, games too became a category delivered primarily online whether as physical product delivered by an internet retailer or direct as a download. In total entertainment in the UK is now 46% sold online.

There is barely a bricks and mortar entertainment retailer in the UK who does not now also offer online sales. And ERA members such as Spotify, Deezer, Blinkbox and Lovefilm are pioneering entirely new ways of delivering content to consumers.

What none of this changes of course is the parlous state of sales in 2012. The 12% value decline in the market was almost four times that seen in 2011. More than half a billion pounds worth of retail turnover in entertainment retailing simply disappeared

- equivalent to £9.06 for every man, woman and child in the UK, more than the price of the average DVD.

Music was first into the trenches in the digital revolution, games followed in 2012 with digital capturing a third of the entire market: physical retailers will now be looking anxiously at the video business which seems to be reaching its own tipping point.

The fundamental changes taking place in the entertainment market were defined by two key indicators in 2012:

• Video games followed music to become a majority online business in 2012. Only video is now still a majority bricks and mortar business.

• Total digital entertainment sales exceeded £1bn for the first time during 2012, a significant milestone for the "new" entertainment industry.

With a final year-end tally of £1.033bn, digital sales of music, video and games grew by 11.4% over 2011 to account for a quarter of the combined entertainment market.

Those sales were far from evenly spread. Digital accounted for just 6.1% of the video market, but 38% of the music business.

The result is that of the total digital entertainment pie, video accounts for just 9.5%, while videogames accounts for more than half - 53.4%.

ERA's entertainment market statistics combine data from three leading sources:

• Official Charts Company data on actual sales of music and video (physical) and music (digital);

• GfK Chart-Track data on actual sales of videogames on physical formats;

• IHS Screen Digest estimates of digital sales of video and videogames. Historical figures have been restated this year in the light of more up-to-date information.