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Business News HMV Timeline Retail
HMV biggest seller of music discs this summer, though Amazon still leads entertainment retail at large
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 30 October 2018
Kantar Worldpanel has published its latest report on the UK entertainment retail sector, revealing that while Amazon strengthened its position as the biggest entertainment retailer overall, HMV was the market leader in physical music sales over the summer quarter.
According to Kantar’s figures, HMV enjoyed a second consecutive quarter of market share growth in the physical music space, rising to 28% of the market, and allowing it to overtake Amazon to become the biggest seller of musical discs in the UK.
Strong physical sales of the ‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again’ soundtrack helped in no small part, it taking over from the soundtrack to ‘The Greatest Showman’ as the physical release that keeps on giving. You know, until they release the covers version of ‘The Greatest Showman’ soundtrack next month.
It’s not just soundtracks though. All the buzz around the 100th edition of ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ helped too, that edition of the legendary compilation series selling twice as many copies as boring old ‘Now 99’.
However, Amazon still has the biggest market share for physical entertainment retail at large, ie when DVDs and games are added into the mix. Amazon had a particularly strong quarter in gaming, which helped it to widen the gap between it and HMV when all three strands of entertainment retail are counted. It increased its market share by 1.8% to 23.2%.
Kantar also noted that while the second ‘Mamma Mia!’ soundtrack has been providing a nice boost to high street retailers in recent months, the DVD release of the movie should also deliver the goods in the all-important fourth quarter. And if the retailers can persuade those DVD buyers to also impulse purchase Cher’s recently released Abba covers album, then the disc sellers could have a decent Christmas courtesy of Messrs Andersson and Ulvaeus.
