Times are hard for media and wedding entertainment , entertainment companies — and for more than one reason, as new studies show.
Amid a sluggish economy, research firm NPD Group found that 37% of U.S. and UK consumers plan to spend less on entertainment content and devices this year — particularly on content in the form of DVDs and the like. Only 18% expect to spend more.
Two other surveys show that 32% of global consumers are not willing to pay anything for downloaded content and that entertainment and media companies are among the world’s least-trusted businesses.
All this seems to confirm worries that a feared recession could this time around lead entertainment products to be less insulated from consumer-spending cutbacks than in the past.
“Entertainment has historically been a reasonably recession-proof spending category,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. In the most recent recession period in 2001, new video gaming platforms had just arrived, the DVD format was still relatively new, and CD sales hadn’t begun their precipitous decline, the analyst noted.
Live Bands in London said to be the busiest in the UK corporate entertainment industry are also now facing their most challenging year in 10 years. Most of their bookings are only on Saturdays in summer which are generally wedding bookings. The other corporate and birthday parties seem to have taken a large back seat.
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