High street retailers HMV, Game and Argos have stolen market share from etailers Amazon and Rakuten in the physical entertainment market.

HMV was the strongest performer as it narrowed the gap with Amazon by 2.5 percentage points for the 12 weeks ending September 27, according to Kantar Worldpanel research.

Amazon still has the biggest share Amazon with 20.4% of the market, but fell by 1.2 percentage points in the period.

In contrast, HMV’s share grew 1.3 percentage points to 13.6% of the overall physical entertainment market.

Kantar Worldpanel strategic insight director Fiona Keenan said: “The past quarter saw 68.4% of all physical entertainment sales came through the high street – up from 64.6% last year and the highest since May 2014, when big film releases such as Frozen drove footfall to stores.

“This strong performance has been led by the games market in particular, where high street spend grew by 7% in the past quarter.”

 Market share for 12 weeks ending 28 September 14 (%)Market share for 12 weeks ending 27 September 15 (%)Percentage point change

Amazon

21.6

20.4

-1.2

Tesco

16.0

15.7

-0.3

HMV

12.3

13.6

1.3

Game

9.5

10.6

1.1

Asda

11.2

9.2

-2.0

Sainsbury’s

7.3

8.2

0.9

Argos

3.2

4.2

1.0

Morrisons

3.2

3.4

0.2

Rakuten

2.5

0.8

-1.7

Other

13.2

13.9

0.7

However, Kantar predicts Black Friday will help online retailers claw back their lost market market share.

Keenan added: “Give Amazon’s significant focus on [Black Friday] we’d expect it to come out on top again. But while sales figures resulting from the campaign are impressive, past offers have appealed to shoppers that already buy these types of products, rather than enticing new shoppers into the market and really driving incremental spend.”

Consumers spending increasing amounts of time on their mobile devices is also affecting the sale of physical entertainment products.

Mobile purchases accounted for almost 10% of online physical entertainment sales this quarter, up 23% on this time last year.

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