ERA YEARBOOK CONFIRMS 10TH CONSECUTIVE YEAR OF GROWTH FOR ENTERTAINMENT

Tuesday March 7, 2023 - The UK home entertainment market enjoyed its tenth consecutive year of growth in 2022 to reach an all-time-record, according to figures published today in the annual yearbook of digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

The ERA Yearbook is the definitive compilation of statistics on the UK music, video and games markets and is available to download free here.

Confirming preliminary figures first released in January, the ERA Yearbook reveals that the UK music, video and games sectors generated £11.08bn in retail revenues in 2022, up 6.9% on 2021 and a dramatic 39% up on the last pre-pandemic year of 2019. 

Five key insights from the ERA Yearbook:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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.