U.K. MUSIC RETAIL STILL ON THE RISE

Growth in streaming has driven the U.K.’s music retail sector to £564m in the first half of the year, a 11.2% rise over H1 2016, according to figures from the Entertainment Retailers Association.

Across music, video and games, entertainment retail grew 6.4% year over year in H1 2017 to £2.997b—up from £2.817b at 2016's halfway point. Music, which takes just under 20% of the entertainment market, grew fastest at 11.2%.

The strong start to 2017 owes a lot to Ed Sheeran, whose ÷ (Atlantic) tops the biggest-selling entertainment product list (including games and video) of the first six months of 2017 with 2.065m units. Rag‘n’Bone Man’s debut album Human (Columbia) generated sales of 694k to take sixth place. Now That’s What I Call Music 96 (Sony/Universal) is the third music-related best-seller at #8 with 530k sales. Check out the full list of best-selling albums here.

Three quarters (75.4%) of music revenues are now accounted for by digital. However, vinyl bucked the trend by increasing 35.7% in volume to 1.9m units in the first half of 2017, with value increasing 37.6% to £37.3m.

It looks like 2017 will be the third consecutive year of growth for the industry, which was up 4.6% in 2016 and 3.5% in 2015.

In H1 2016, music retail in Blighty earned £507.8m and ended the year at £1.11b.

Games, at £1.44b, accounted for just over 48% of the entertainment retail market in the first half, with video representing around one third.

ERA CEO Kim Bayley enthused: “Entertainment has now seen over four years of continuous growth thanks to a combination of digital services pioneering new ways of consuming music, video and games, and physical retailers working hard to maximise sales of discs. To now deliver another £180m worth of sales in the first half of 2017 is really extraordinary.”