Creative Industries Statistics

The creative industries contribution to the economy accounted for 2.89% of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2009 an increase of 0.07% on 2008 in relative terms but in absolute terms GVA decreased by 1% from £36.6bn to £36.3bn. The biggest contribution to UK GVA from the creative industries came from publishing with 0.92%, then advertising with 0.55% and TV and radio with 0.38% (figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)). The sector accounted for 10.6% of UK exports in 2009 of which publishing and TV and radio accounted for the greatest exports of services with 3.1% and 2.6% respectively. There were 106,700 creative businesses in the UK in 2011, up to 5.1% from 4.9% in 2009 and 108,820 creative local units, an increase from 4.2% in 2009 to 4.3%. The biggest contribution to the number of businesses came from music and visual performing arts with 30,460 or 1.46% of enterprises and 1.21% of local units in 2011. Advertising accounted for 16,101 businesses or 0.77% of UK total and design 14,720 or 0.71%. Creative businesses employed 1.5m people directly or in a creative role in another industry. It amounts to 5.14% of UK employment. It is a small increase on 2008 when the number was 1.44m or 4.99% of UK employment. The music and visual and performing arts were the largest employers in the creative industries sector with 300,000 employees in 2009 or 1% of UK employment. Next came advertising with 0.92% of employment and 268254 people employed, then publishing with 0.84% and 243,809 people.

Internet Access Still Increasing In UK

There are millions of people in the UK who have never used the Internet. The ONS suggests the figure is about 9.2 million people. By contrast over 38 million people are Internet users and 30.1 million people use the Internet every day, almost double the estimate for 2006.

The people most likely to have never used the Internet are the over-65s, the widowed, those on low incomes and those with no formal qualifications. The survey also showed that 19.2m homes had Internet access which is equivalent to 73%. There was an increase of people connecting by mobile phone up to 31% from 23% in 2009, 31m used the Internet to buy or order goods, 98% of people with incomes over £41,600 had used the Internet, the rate of Internet use decreased in line with income and 69% of people with an income of less than £10,399 had used the Internet, in terms of qualificatons, 45% of those with no formal qualifications had used the Internet compared with 97% of those with a degree. Approximately 17.4m people watch television or listen to the radio over the Internet up from 6.4m in 2006.

Last Rajars Results 2009

The Rajars survey for the last quarter of 2009 shows that the BBC was the popular radio service provider in the UK taking 55.2% of the total listening share (TSA%). Commercial radio took 42.6% and other listening got 2.2%. BBC Network Radio took 46.7% and BBC local/regional radio 8.5%. The most popular of the BBC's stations was again Radio 2 with 16.5%, Radio 4 came next with 12.5%. Commercial radio's share was divided between national commercial radio with 10.4% and local commercial radio with 32.2%. The survey is of all individuals aged over 15 for the period ending December 2009.

Creative Businesses in the UK

The number of businesses in the creative industries in the UK grew from 125,300 in 2007 to 157,400 in 2008. The sub-sector with the largest number of new businesses was the software, computer games and electronic publishing category which increased by 18,200 additional businesses from 56,800 in 2007 to 75,000 in 2008. Advertising, music and the visual and performing arts also had significant increases in numbers of businesses.

The increase in the number of creative businesses did not bring an similar increase in the number of people employed in the creative industries. In fact there was a significant fall in their number. The software, computer games and electronic publishing category increased their numbers by 40,700 to 681,600. The largest percentage increase was in architecture at 8%, from 120,700 to 130,100, a difference of 9,400. There were also increases in the numbers of people employed in the advertising (1%), art and antiques (6%), music and the visual and performing arts (4%) categories but these were offset by decreases in crafts (-7%), design and designer fashion (-18%), video, film and photography (-3%), publishing and radio and TV (-3%). There was an overall decrease of 7,000 in the number of people employed in the creative industries in the UK in 2008.