HMV's falling market share came primarily from its high street shops.

Online giant Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has overtaken British high street retailer HMV Group plc (LON:HMV) the UK’s leading entertainment retailer, new research shows.

Amazon was shown to have 22.4 per cent of the overall market for videos, games and music as of the 12 weeks ending December 26th 2011, while HMV had a 17.5 per cent share, the research by Kantar Worldpanel shows. By comparison, during the same week the previous year, 19.6% of the market belonged to HMV, whilst Amazon sat just behind with 19.4%.

HMV's falling market share came primarily from its high street shops, with online sales holding up well.

Fiona Keenan, Consumer Insight Director at Kantar Worldpanel, says: "Amazon’s strong performance is down to a number of factors: it is typically really competitive on price, has a wide range of products with no restriction on display space, and is known for its very good customer service."

Supermarket chains

Three of the next four places in the chart are occupied by supermarket chains Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury holding shares of 11.4 per cent, 8.1 per cent and 5.2 per cent respectively. Morrisons is in 8th place with a share of 2.7 per cent.

"Despite Christmas being a popular time for shoppers to buy DVDs, games and music, spending was down on the same period last year", Keenan says.

"We saw a lot of retailers, particularly supermarkets, promoting savings on big releases like ‘Harry Potter’ when shoppers spent money elsewhere in store and this will have taken some value out of the market."