Music, TV, film and game downloads fail to boost high street as physical sales fall 17.6%
Downloads of music, TV shows, films and video games topped £1bn in the UK for the first time in 2012, with digital entertainment sales now accounting for almost a quarter of the market.
However, despite the growth of digital sales, high street retailers will find little to cheer about as physical sales of CDs, DVDs and video games, which account for 75% of the market, plummeted 17.6% last year.
This caused the overall UK home entertainment market to decline 12% last year to £4.21bn.
UK digital entertainment sales rose 11.4% year on year to £1.033bn, according figures published on Tuesday by the Entertainment Retailers Association.
Digital music sales rose 15% year on year to £333m, although the figure excludes revenues from streaming services such as Spotify, We7 and Deezer.
The still relatively small market for buying digital video products rose 20.3% year on year to £97.9m.
Video gaming remains the biggest digital sector – thanks to online games such as World of Warcraft, social gaming and owners of Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStations making digital transactions via their games consoles – growing 7.7% year on year to £552m in 2012.
"Breaching the £1bn barrier is an incredible achievement for the UK's digital entertainment retailers and reflects their huge investment in new and innovative services which means you can buy music, video and games literally at any time of the day and wherever you are," said Kim Bayley, ERA's director general.
On the flipside, ERA's figures also highlighted the continuing decline of physical home entertainment content sales. CD music sales fell by 14.9% year on year in 2012, DVD and Blu-ray dropped 11.4% and physical copies of video games slumped 26.4%.
ERA raises factors including the decision by many music, video and games suppliers not to release key titles during the summer to avoid the London Olympics as one reason for the steep decline in physical home entertainment sales in 2012.
"The dearth of attractive releases during summer 2012 was clearly a significant factor," said Bayley. "Suppliers need to do more to rebalance their release schedules and improve the quality of their releases. No retailer can afford to pay overheads on a store for 52 weeks of the year if all the key releases are going to be concentrated in the last quarter."
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