The value of the UK's entertainment retail market grew last year for the first time in five years with the increasing popularity of film and music streaming sites.
Sales increased 4 per cent to £5.4 billion mainly fueled by a 40.2 per cent increase in digital film downloads, streams and subscriptions to £621.4 million.
'This is a stunning result after at least five years of decline. Retailers have invested hundreds of million of pounds in new digital service and these numbers suggest the public is responding in their droves,' said Kim Bayley, director general of the ERA.
'New technologies have historically presented challenged to the entertainment business but these results show how our members are helping music, video and games companies find new markets,' she said.
'Services like Netflix, Lovefilm and Blinkbox are transforming the video business by making content available over multiple devices,' she added.
The number of music tracks streamed doubled to 7.4 billion and the subscriptions to music services such as Spotify and Deezer rose 34 per cent to £103 million.
Total sales of albums and singles fell just 0.5 per cent to £1.04 billion with the help of downloads and streaming despite the continued plummeting sales of CDs.
Album sales were 6.4 per cent down across all formats to £772 million. CD sales fell 13 per cent to 60.6 million - although still account for almost two thirds of all albums sold in the UK. Digital sales increased to 32.6 million albums - up 7 per cent on 2012.
Total sales of films increased 3.7 per cent to £2.04 billion while sales of DVDs also declined 6.8 per cent to £1.4 billion.
Sales of video games increased by 6.6 per cent and are now the market's biggest sector accounting for 41.4 per cent of the total entertainment sales.
Vinyl also continued its revival with sales doubling to 780,000 to £14.6 million - the highest since 1997 when 817,000 were sold.
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