HMV overtakes Amazon for physical music sales

HMV is now the UK's leading retailer for physical music sales, overtaking Amazon. 

Based on sales over the past 12 weeks (up to September 23), HMV's market share of physical music (CD and vinyl) rose to 28%, pushing ahead of Amazon (21.1%), according to the latest data from Kantar Worldpanel. 

The landmark Now That's What I Call Music 100 and the Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again cast recording were among the best physical sellers over the three month period. 

The news comes as it appears that supermarkets Sainsbury's and Tesco are cutting back on their physical music offering.

HMV's head of music John Hirst told Music Week: "Everybody at HMV is incredibly passionate about music and particularly the physical product, from our central support operations, through our distribution centres and, of course, in store with our amazing staff delivering gold standard customer service day in, day out. Whilst the customer still wants physical music - and they really do - we'll be here to put it in their hands." 

Hirst added that HMV's website was their "big success story of this year", saying they'd found a way to compete with giants like Amazon. 

"We’re trying to innovate as much as we can," he said. "We’re getting some great results on pre-order, for vinyl in particular - vinyl is 50% of our music offering sales-wise online and obviously the value in the margin there is really strong."

Read up on the big albums still to be released in 2018 here.