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Business News Retail Top Stories
ERA identify opportunities in high street music market
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 1 December 2009
New research by the Entertainment Retailers Association tracking music sales by postcode has found that when there are more shops selling music, people buy more. That, the ERA concludes, means there are areas in the UK where there is a gap in the market for more high street music sellers.
Of course, the last ten years has seen a huge decrease in the number of high street record stores, with the closure of the Fopp, MVC, Musiczone, Zavvi and Woolies retail chains and countless independent music stores. Research company Millward Brown, which provided the postcode data, reckons some 1600 music-selling shops have closed in just the past five years.
Commenting on the new research, ERA chief Kim Bayley told reporters: “It’s a simple but vital point in a year when we’ve seen the closure of Woolies and Zavvi and literally hundreds of music outlets. Put music in front of people and they will buy it. These figures indicate that there may well be a number of areas where there is still scope to open new record stores. Proximity and convenience are clearly not the only factors when it comes to persuading people to buy music, but this study certainly indicates that if you make it difficult to buy music, then people will buy less. The lesson for the music industry is clear: maintaining as broad a possible retail distribution network could be a significant factor in boosting music sales”.
The ERA research compared music sales in each postcode with population to calculate the average music purchases per consumer. This makes for some interesting stats because the big cities which would otherwise top any survey of ‘most music sales per town’ come lower down the list, with the exception of central London, which still tops the poll (presumably because so many people come into the area from Greater London and beyond to buy music, so it’s not just the local population buying).
Excluding London, the towns and cities where most music is sold relative to population are Inverness, Cambridge, Twickenham, Glasgow, Brighton, Edinburgh and Manchester. The lowest selling towns and cities include Harrow, Wigan, Motherwell, Bradford and Wolverhampton.
The trade body for entertainment retailers reckons that one explanation for the low per population music sales in those latter areas is the lack of music products available to consumers on the high street, suggesting that if retailers in those areas added a CD department they might find there was customer interest, and in doing so up the local music buying average.
