Britain knows how to deal with misery. As banks totter and fall, British women turn to fantasy Manolo Blahniks – or more precisely buy the Sex and the City DVD, which at £9.99 is considerably cheaper than a new pair of killer heels. Last week, Britons bought 920,000 copies of the film, making it the fastest-selling DVD of the year so far – and one of the quickest-selling to date. Which goes to show that when politicians lecture us on how worried we must be, the rational response is to ignore all that and seek good, honest entertainment.

The upbeat mood applies to more than just DVDs. A rather different audience went out and bought up the latest album from the Kings of Leon, Only By The Night, last week. In all, 220,000 were whisked from the shelves, making it 2008’s second-strongest debut (after Coldplay). Elsewhere, Game, the computer games retailer, said that its sales of games and consoles were up by 5 per cent in the eight weeks to the end of September.

Game reckons that credit-crunched Britons will still buy 3.7 million games consoles between now and Christmas at prices from £100 for a handheld Nintendo DS to £300 for the still overpriced Sony PlayStation3. Britons have bought 1.5 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV already this year, and a similar number more could be shifted as Christmas approaches.

The prevailing wisdom is that music, films and games represent a cheap form of entertainment, certainly compared with holidays abroad and nights out at London’s ludicriously costly restaurants and bars. Certainly, for the moment, the entertainment business is showing resilience, not just in the UK, but in the US. Edgar Bronfman, the boss of Warner Music, one of the four majors, is now fond of saying that after years of trauma, music is now a reliable earner. Well, certainly, more reliable than shares in Lehman Brothers.

But can it last? After all, the first response to any crisis is defiance, at least before the credit card gets maxed out. Yet, games, in particular, are not cheap; a new title might cost £45. Look again, and you can see Britons hustling for value when it comes to entertainment spending. See the No 2 in the album chart: Rihanna’s now well-worn Good Girl Gone Bad, up there largely because its price has been cut to £5. It is also possible, at some outlets, to defray the cost of a computer game by trading it in; take a hot title back after a fortnight, and you can get back £30. That makes it a form of rental, and can quickly lead to price deflation if cash-conscious gamers feel no need to keep a completed game on their own shelves.

It is also worth bearing in mind that as money gets tight, free becomes an even more attractive price point. Piracy tends to increase in an economic downturn, say those with long memories in the film and video business. Already, a staggering one in three Britons admits to participating in physical or digital piracy, a proportion that has been rising steadily in recent years as piracy has been made easier by the internet. Even stars recognise that if you take on the pirates, you are fighting a losing battle; Oasis is the latest big act to give fans the chance to listen to their new album free online.

Piracy may go up in a downturn, but home video sales in Britain carried on growing through the early 1990s. So did the global music market. After all, why be miserable when you can listen to Abba again and again? The difference this time, though, is the digital revolution – and whether some of the emerging digital music services can capture the attention of the cost-conscious consumer.

Take Nokia’s all-you-can-download Comes With Music service – which comes with a £130 phone. Yes, there’s an upfront payment, but anybody who buys more than, say, 12 albums a year might think that they are on to a winner. And there’s a phone, too. Nokia is hardly the only music subscription service that will emerge. But as the necessity of entertainment collides with financial reality, the way we get access to music, and, in due course, games and films, might change more rapidly than expected.

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MySpace, the social networking website, has riled independent music companies by leaving most of them out of its launch of a free streaming music service. It is surprising, in that MySpace has prided itself on being a home to emerging talent.

Now the indies are complaining that they have been squeezed out in an anticompetitive way by the four music majors, which have signed up. Doubtless complaints will continue, until the indies, which bargain collectively through the Merlin organisation, join too.

Indies are often left out in digital music launches, which is irritating for fans of, say, Arctic Monkeys or Radiohead. Of course, there is no reason why an independent is necessarily more authentic than a major; they are, after all, all record companies. But leaving them out might possibly get a competition bureaucrat in Brussels overexcited. And nobody wants that.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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