NDM News Story 36: Netflix, Spotify and Apple power UK entertainment revenue to record £6.1bn

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/06/netflix-spotify-apple-uk-entertainment-revenue-adele

Thanks to the booming popularity of services such as Netflix, Spotify and Apple, UK revenue from entertainment services has greatly increased. With Adele's return to the music industry, she has been a huge component of the increase in sales, even surpassing the sales of Fifa 2016. Although the entertainment industry was facing major problems with piracy and other legal alternatives, the entertainment industry has made a great comeback with the introduction of popular streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. In terms of the film and TV market, this year may be the first year that digital sale will surpass the physical sales however, people are still optimistic of the physical DVD sales, believing that they are still needed in today's society. Despite sales of digital music still going strong, it did decrease slightly over the year with the sales of vinyl surprisingly steadily increasing. The video game market also saw a large rise in sales similarly to the TV and film market. 

•  Adele hauled the total UK music market to its first growth in at least a decade, up 3.5% to £1.06bn.
• Adele sold 2.6m copies of 25 in just six weeks after its November launch
•  The football game sold 2.5m units between its release in September and the end of the year
• sales and rentals of physical CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well as downloads, streams and subscriptions for TV, films, music and video games – grew in total by 5.6% to £6.1bn. The previous high of £6.04bn was achieved in 2004.
• Spending on digital TV and films surged 30% to top £1bn for the first time in 2015.

As new and digital media has made it significantly easier to access content on any device with some sort of internet access, entertainment is reaching new heights of popularity while also improving the situations of piracy and illegal streaming. This is primarily due to audiences wanting convergence, meaning that all their videos they watch or music that they listen to, can be found on one service, which makes them more willing to pay a small sum of money to get such services.