Physical CD, DVD and Blu-ray sales dominate UK digital downloads - 2012
Physical discs still continue to dominate market share over digital sales, and although overall entertainment sales figures are down on 2011, digital sales have broken the £1bn threshold in 2012.
Recent UK entertainment sales figures for 2012 confirm that, although physical sales are slowing, the market overwhelmingly still enjoys buying music, film and video games in the physical form of a CD, DVD and Blu-ray, contributing to over 75% of market sales.
The news these days is about how digital downloads has all but killed the sale of physical music albums and DVD movies. Whilst digital certainly is taking more and more of the market share every year, optical discs still retain the lion’s share of the market, and are showing huge resilience in a market fast trending towards digital downloads.
It’s been almost fifteen years since the launch of iTunes in the UK, and many predicted the immediate demise of the optical disc in all its glorified formats. However, whilst sales of the physical format do continue to decline, an interesting note is that 77.3% of the UK market share of all entertainment sales is still dominated by DVDs, CDs and Blu-ray. Yes, that’s not a typo, the optical disc formats still reign strong despite a decrease of 17.6% compared to 2011.
Compared to 2011, total digital sales have increased by over 10% in the UK, showing continued growth year on year and taking the digital sales total to just over £1bn in the UK. At the same time music, film and video games showed declines of 14.9%, 11.4% and 26.4% respectively.
CD sales, however, still dominate over digital sales, with a 62% market share compared to digital. Optical discs as a whole (which include all physical formats) continue with 77.3% of overall market sales, compared to digital downloads which have a market penetration of 22.7%.
The majority of this digital market share continues to be in the video game sector which accounts for over 50% of digital sales, with the remaining being made up by music and films.
The landscape of video game retailing has changed drastically in the last decade, due to an increase in direct online sales. Video game manufacturers have utilised a social online community model for retail of their game for direct download to computer, or games console, as well as an increasing trend of in-app or in-game purchases being offered to gamers. The outlook for a bricks and mortar video game retailer does not look good as the new model only really works in the online environment.
With video downloads growing faster at 20% than music at 15%, video appears to out-perform music, but as video is new to the market it will show initial high market share figures compared to digital music. However a 15% growth for the established digital music sector is nothing short of phenomenal either.
Overall sales for the entertainment industry were down 12%, to about £4.2bn. Some one-off factors do contribute to the trend of general decline.
Many big music, film and video game releases were not made during the summer of 2012 as the London Olympics dominated the UK news and many companies decided to avoid any major product launch during the summer months.
The UK market still has an appetite for physical purchases over digital, but that also depends on the film studios providing A listed entertainment to for the discerning consumer to purchase. The second half of 2012 provided proof of this appetite, as the releases of hit movies The Dark Knight, The Hunger Games, Avengers and Prometheus saw an increase in the sales of Blu-ray and DVD.
If the entertainment companies can tweak their release schedule whilst at the same time improving on the quality of releases and content, then certainly there is an active and hungry market that wants to purchase a higher-value physical item be it packaged DVD or Blu-ray case, especially when it is provided with more collection value and special packaging as a box-set or limited Blu-ray releases title.
Signs already show that the entertainment industry have taken active note and showing an ability to adapt fast with the 2013 sales figures of grade A listed movies doing very well with titles such as The Hobbit, Les Misérables, Zero Dark Thirty, Skyfall and Life of Pi.
Blu-ray sales of these titles are anywhere from 45-56% of the market share and certainly with 3D versions of the releases only available in Blu-ray format, helping with the push for Blu-ray to become the dominant video format over DVD video.
Entertainment sales figures from the US Market 2012 - The re-emergence of Vinyl sales
A medium that was previously thought obsolete by the early 2000’s is vinyl. Recent sales figures show vinyl pressing over the last sixty months gaining year on year popularity and with record sales reaching 4.6 million album sales in 2012 in the US market. An increase of 18% on the previous year at 3.9 million units. It makes a small but noticeable dent in the overall US sales market share representing of 1.4% of all album sales, and 2.3% share of all physical album sales.
Digital Track Sales (individual songs)
Since the launch of digital downloads, consumers now have a choice to download individual tracks rather than entire albums. In the USA, the total number of single tracks downloaded in 2012 was 1336 million. If we average out an album to contain 10 tracks, then this is the equivalent of 133.6 million digital albums.
UK Entertainment Sales outlook 2013
Perhaps the most surprising trend is the massive digital market share captured by the video game industry, this looks to dominate the digital sphere as well as gain on the physical units sold as more and more game developers look to the social online model for direct games sales and in-app purchases.
The UK market still prefers physical album sales to digital downloads, but the flexibility on offer by being able to download individual songs, keeps the digital music download sector very buoyant and making further inroads into the physical market, however, the number of online sales through iTunes does seem to be reaching a plateau as the increase in sales is slowing.
The digital download video market is growing at the fastest rate, with a 20% increase, and this will continue as more and more people start using online streaming services such as Netflix which stream straight to the main TV in the home, currently however digital downloads make a small dent at 6% on the overall video market as consumers still prefer purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-ray due to the lack of internet or network enabled televisions in the home.
Sources: ERA, Home Media Magazine, Nielson, Billboard. Glorious Noise, Digital Digest.