The ERA Yearbook, which publishes statistics on the UK music, video and games markets and is available to download here.
Five key insights from the ERA Yearbook:
Music, video and games continue to outpace their nearest competitors (p. 10)
While the combined music, video and games sectors grew by 6.9% in value in value in 2022, sales of the entertainment hardware required to play it – TVs, PCs etc – actually fell by 0.3% and consumer expenditure on reading grew just 1.5% to £7.5bn.
The video market is now more than four times bigger than the cinema market
The video market grew by 14.4% in 2022 to reach £4.43bn, another all-time high (p. 11). Total box office revenue figures for the UK (+Ireland) were £978.5m, according to Comscore.
Consumers are choosing older entertainment over new releases in video and music
While media attention has focused on how older “catalogue” music dominates the music streaming market, the ERA Yearbook reveals that video is following this trend with more than half of film downloads and two-thirds of physical video sales coming from older titles (p. 50). Meanwhile the share of CD sales taken by catalogue titles has increased every year since 2018 from 37% to 49% (p. 72).
The games business is back to growth
After slippage in 2021 following the lockdown boom, the games market grew by 2.3% to £4.66bn in 2022, 21% ahead of the last pre-pandemic year, 2019.
Vinyl is driving the value of the physical music business
With 14.1% of sales still from physical formats, music remains well ahead of games (10.5%) and video (4.9%) – p. 13. The key to the resilience of that physical share is vinyl which account for 54% of the value of the physical albums market.