On 6 March 2020, the Entertainment Retailers Association published official figures for 2019 which showed sales of video, music and games reached a new all-time high of £7.8 billion in their seventh year of continuous growth.
The entertainment industry grew 2.4 per cent in total, with the ‘Nintendo Switch games’ and ‘Digital games’ categories being singled out as two of the four biggest winners of the year. They had a £37.3m and £35.1m increase in sales respectively.
As the table below shows, the games sector is still the largest single sector of the entertainment market, with a total of £3.8 billion in sales in 2019.
Games | Video | Music | Total | Per cent of market | |
Digital | £3,171.5 | £2,109.4 | £1,092.6 | £6,373.5 | 81.8 |
Online | £274.2 | £211.6 | £137.4 | £623.2 | 8.0 |
Internet | £3,445.7 | £2,321.0 | £1,230.0 | £6,996.7 | 89.8 |
Bricks & Mortar | £328.4 | £289.0 | £180.7 | £798.1 | 10.2 |
Total | £3,774.1 | £2,610.0 | £1,410.7 | £7,794.8 | 100.0 |
Internet sales now account for nearly 90 per cent of entertainment sales, having increased dramatically over the last ten years. The Chief Executive of the Entertainment Retailers Association, Kim Bayley, commented on the change:
“This is extraordinary, the internet now accounts for 90p in every pound spent on entertainment. It is quite simply the most dramatic revolution in entertainment retailing ever seen.”