Lifestyles Data

The pattern of UK music sales over the past 35 years has changed from mainly vinyl in 1975 (92m), to cassettes in 1989 (83m) and CDs in 1992 (71m) and now in 2008, downloads account for 7% of the market (10.3m).

Other interesting cultural facts include that in 2008 only 42% of over 15 year olds read a national daily paper compared with 72% in 1978. There was a 0.2% increase in British people taking holidays abroad between 2007-8 to make a new record of 45.5m holidays.

In 2008 there were 164m UK cinema admissions compared with the 1.6bn admissions at the peak of cinema attendance in 1948. The 2008 figure is a 1.1% increase on 2007 but a fall of 6.7% on the most recent peak of 176m visits in 2002. The proportion of men and women going to the cinema has remained unchanged. More males over 7 (20%) went to the cinema than females over 7 (17%). The age group that goes to the cinema most frequently are the 15-24 year olds with 41% going at least once a month along with 31% of 7-14 year olds and 22% of 25-34 year olds.

Film genre preferences varied with age. The most popular genres for 7-14s were comedy, musicals, family films and animations, 15-24s preferred youth-themes, crime, action and comedy films, 35-44s preferred adventure and animation, 45-54s preferred drama, musicals and action and over 55s preferred drama, musicals and comedy.

In 2008 15 of the top 20 films at the UK box office were US productions and the other 5 were UK/US collaborations including 'Mamma Mia', 'Quantum of Solace' and 'The Dark Knight' according to the UK Film Council.