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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/
UK music, video and games sales higher than those of magazines, books and newspapers last year.
The soaring popularity of services like Netflix, Amazon and Spotify has pushed the amount consumers spend on home entertainment products past the amount spent on books, magazines and newspapers for the first time.
UK consumers spent a record £7.2bn last year on all forms of music, video and games, from CDs, DVDs and vinyl records to console software and subscriptions to music and TV streaming services.
That surpassed the £7.1bn spent by consumers on the “printed word” books, magazines and newspapers, according to a report from the Entertainment Retailers Association.
The report credits the “dramatic growth” in the popularity of paid-for digital services such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Deezer and Spotify as the key factor behind booming sales of entertainment.
“It is an extraordinary testament to the appeal and resonance of digital entertainment services that they have helped home entertainment to hit this milestone,” said Kim Bayley, the chief executive of the ERA.
Entertainment sales were fuelled by hits including Ed Sheeran’s album Divide (the biggest-selling entertainment product of last year), the video games FIFA 18 and Call of Duty: WWII and the movies Beauty and the Beast and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Spending on printed-word products peaked in 2007 at £8.3bn and has struggled since then to replace revenue lost from traditional physical formats with new digital income.
Sales of consumer ebooks are at their lowest level since 2011, the year the ebook craze took off as Jeff Bezos’s market-dominating Amazon Kindle took the UK by storm.
“The 2008-09 recession hurt both the entertainment and reading markets,” said Themis Kokolakakis of the Leisure Industries Research Centre. “Since 2012, the entertainment market has recovered very strongly. Traditional media is under pressure … partly because there is so much competition for people’s time and attention. Entertainment has grown while reading has stagnated.”
The ERA said the statistics showed the dramatic change in consumer habits as they shifted from buying physical products to digital consumption and formats.
Five years ago, 80% of revenues were generated by “buy to own” formats such as DVDs and CDs. Now 56% of revenues come from digital sourcesincluding video streaming, electronic movie rental, subscriptions, online multiplayer games and in-app and mobile purchases.
Two physical products, however, have bucked the downward sales trend. The vinyl revival is still going strong with sales of LPs up nearly 35% last year. Sales of boxed software for games consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PlayStation, have also made a comeback, rising by 5% to £750m – the first growth in a decade.
The ERA’s Bayley said retailers of physical products were driving the vinyl revival: “Vinyl is a prime example of retailers nurturing demand for a product most people had long written off. It would be foolish to underestimate consumers’ continuing affection for physical product.”
The amount spent by consumers streaming and downloading films and TV shows overtook sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs for the first time in 2016.
Last year, a total of 33 music, video or games titles sold more than 500,000 units. Ten clocked up sales of more than 1m units and three sold more than 2m. They were Ed Sheeran’s Divide with 2.7m, and the computer games FIFA 18 with 2.69m and Call of Duty: WWII with 2.44m.
The success of Sheeran’s album – which at one point overwhelmed the official charts, with all 16 songs making the Top 20 singles list – helped to push up music streaming and downloads on services such as Spotify and Apple Music by 16.6% in the first half of last year.
Conversely, sales of CDs have been in decline since 2007, when the market was worth £1.12bn. It is now worth less than a sixth of that.
Overall consumer spending on home entertainment rose 8.8% last year – faster than other leisure sectors including: eating out, up 7.7%; alcoholic drinks, up 6%; overseas holidays, up 4.4%; and gambling, up 1%.