15 July 2016
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the biggest-selling entertainment product in the first six months of 2016, according to research from the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).
ERA’s exclusive Entertainment Chart combines sales of music, video and games to provide a definitive ranking of the UK’s most successful entertainment products.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens leads a Top 40 for the first half of 2016 dominated by video, accounting for 19 of the 40, followed by music albums (12) and games (nine).
The seventh episode in the Star Wars franchise sold 1,818,949 DVDs and Blu-ray discs between January and June, more than 20% ahead of second-placed Bond movie Spectre and with more than double the number of sales of third-placed Now That’s What I Call Music 93.
In total the Top 40 most popular entertainment titles sold 15.8m units. Overall games accounted for 16.6% of the unit sales of the Top 40 titles and music accounted for 25.2%, while video sales accounted for 58.2% of the total.
The top six titles and nine of the Top 10 were titles released in 2016, although in what was a quiet first half for major music releases eight of the 12 best-selling music titles were released in 2015 or in the case of David Bowie’s Best of Bowie as long ago as 2008.
ENDS
The ERA Entertainment Chart can be downloaded here
For more information, please contact Steve Redmond, steve@eraltd.org 07770 924 720
About ERA
ERA is the trade association representing the vast majority of retailers and digital services offering music, video and games. Its members range from independent record shops (Reflex, Sister Ray) to digital services (Spotify, Sky, Deezer, 7digital) to internet retailers (Amazon) to specialist High Street operators (HMV, Game) and supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda, Morrisons)