After a relatively benign year in 2013 for UK recorded music thanks to a small pickup in trade revenues, we project a 5% decline in 2014, with digital music purchasing now falling as consumers shift to ad-supported and subscription access services, while CD sales continue to drop at a double-digit pace each year.

The UK reached a new milestone at the end of 2013 surpassing 1.3 million paying subscribers, a large number of non-paying 'hard bundled' subscribers on Orange/Deezer and Vodafone/Spotify 4G plans, plus several million Spotify freemium and Spotify Free 'smart radio' users.

We project steady expenditure on recorded music as a whole in the period to 2017 from consumers and advertisers at £1.1 billion annually, but anticipate the loss of £90 million in trade revenues in the shift to access due to the labels' lower revenue-share.

Older adults have always watched more TV than younger adults, and even more TV news. The gap has widened over the last five years following the rapid rise in online news consumption via websites or apps among the under 35s, where online is now used as widely as TV for getting news.

Recently published survey data by Ofcom (UK) and Reuters (10 countries) highlight the importance of online as a tool for accessing breaking news, whether search engines, news websites or social networks, along with an expanding field of news content.

Online, with its emphasis on reading rather than watching news stories is no direct substitute for TV. The BBC is by a large margin the most widely accessed online source in the UK, while the challenge for the other TV news providers is to develop commercial models that successfully integrate broadcast with online.

Consolidation in US and European TMT and the rapid expansion of digital giants is creating increasing pressure on the media companies who have to negotiate with them.

In Time Warner, 21st Century Fox identified an acquisition that would give it invaluable global premium content and distribution assets, and the ability to outbid its main rivals in upcoming sports rights auctions. The benefits for Time Warner were less discernible.

The bid was pulled after Time Warner’s management signalled they weren’t interested, and investors reacted with share price movements that helped preclude the bid in the near-term. But consolidation amongst media companies will only make more sense in the years to come.

The appearance of mass market consumer eBooks was delayed, evolved explosively, and has since plateaued more quickly than other media. Physical books are attractive objects and elegant devices compared to CDs and DVDs.

Furthermore, “all you can eat” is not a reader’s mindset, limiting the relevance and growth of mass market eBook subscription services.

Amazon’s mission is to grow market share, and strategic initiatives to move up the supply chain into publishing do not address its core issue: digital provides a poor discovery solution for dedicated book lovers, hence the continued necessity of retailers for publishers.

BSkyB’s Sky Europe project has added a new layer of interest in results of its Continental sister platforms. Sky Italia is almost profitable but with meagre growth prospects, while Sky Deutschland is loss-making but with significant expansion potential

In Germany Sky’s underlying subscriber growth trend is improving while churn is at a historical low. But ARPU growth has stalled, leading us to expect slower revenue growth in fiscal 2015. The latter would be consistent with Sky’s guidance for subscribers and EBITDA

Despite a double dip recession and erosion of its subscriber base, Sky Italia has improved profitability in fiscal 2014. Lower churn points to a possible return to growth – if the economy stabilises

Netflix has always been highly secretive and released very few details about its international streaming performance in individual countries beyond the general statement that it is seeing encouraging progress everywhere

Now at last we can assess Netflix growth trends in the UK with a high degree of confidence as a result of a question added to the BARB ES questionnaire at the beginning of 2014, which is administered to large quarterly samples of 13,500 respondents

On the basis of BARB ES results for Q1 2014, we have revised our UK growth estimates upwards, believing Netflix paid for subscriptions to be above the 3 million mark as it heads into central Europe. Also most striking is Netflix’s popularity among younger households – clearly the cool thing to have

ITV has enjoyed another very positive start to the year, with a repeat 11% increase in adjusted EBITA, this time mainly due to strong NAR growth, further helped by a 20% increase in Online, Pay & Interactive revenues

Broadly flat ITV Studios revenues reflected timing and special factors, including negative changes in the exchange rate. Now the leading US independent producer of unscripted programmes after three further acquisitions, ITV has set its sights on growing scale in scripted content

Promising new opportunities at home and abroad look to be opening up for the ITV broadcast/online business through the expansion of ITV Studios. Nor has this gone unnoticed at a time of growing consolidation in the age of convergence, as indicated by Liberty Global’s acquisition of Sky’s 6.4% stake in ITV

The UK population is ageing, with over-40s in the majority for the first time in 2014/15. Since 2002, Baby boomers (young in the 1960s) and Gen X (1970s) have increased their shares of the UK’s wealth, disposable income and consumer expenditure.

Baby boomers and Gen X remain very firmly engaged with traditional media alongside the internet – older demographics are much more multimedia than younger demographics, who are disengaged with traditional media to the benefit of digital media.

Baby boomers and Gen X are engaged consumers, inclined to switch brands and adopt technology, and brands that optimise exposure to them through traditional media will gain share.

In second of a two part report examining the current state of the UK consumer magazines sector we focus on magazine brands’ prospects in the rapidly evolving digital and mobile landscape.

Mobile presents a particularly fundamental challenge to magazines, but should also act as a spur for publisher innovation; we assess the degree of digital engagement from publishers thus far and consider the risks in ecommerce and opportunities in video.

We look in detail at Good Housekeeping’s digital transformation strategy to be rolled out in the second half of 2014, which combines digital utility solutions with bold innovations in its heritage brand. More publisher experimentation is a pressing necessity; the industry appears to have stalled on digital innovation and new competitors such as Houzz and Wiggle are occupying the digital ground in traditional magazine territory.

In the first of a two part report examining the current state of the UK consumer magazines sector we focus on the performance of print as paid circulation decline accelerated, down 10% year-on-year in 2013.

We consider the display advertising performance of both consumer and B2B magazines across print and digital and provide forecasts through to 2017. While print display advertising decline in consumer magazines accelerated to 8% in 2013, digital growth was 12%, and digital advertising is now 15% of total display revenues.

The market is increasingly diverging between rapidly declining titles and differentiated (often high value) titles with older readerships where circulation falls have been less severe. We expect this gap to continue to widen as an improving economy provides some respite for stronger titles over the next two years.