ABSTRACT
Despite the economic recessions and industrial restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s, the youth market has retained its economic significance. Certainly, the labour markets that had underpinned the explosion of ‘teenage’ consumption in Europe and North America during the 1950s and 1960s have been eroded, and young people’s routes into full-time work have become more protracted and diverse. But the youth market has remained a cornerstone of the media, consumer and entertainment industries. In 1993, for example, the Henley Centre for Forecasting estimated that the British rave scene was worth between £ 1 and £2 billion a year (Veares and Woods, 1993) and, by the end of the 1990s, Ministry of Sound alone had an annual turnover in excess of £100 million. In 2003 the business analysts Datamonitor underscored young people’s continuing market importance in their report Young Adults’ Consumption Behaviour (Datamonitor, 2003). Surveying the demographics, income and spending patterns of 14-to 24-year-olds across
seven European countries, Datamonitor confirmed that entry into full-time employment was being increasingly postponed, with the total number of students set to rise from 17.3 million in 2002 to 18.1 million by 2007. Yet Datamonitor insisted that youth would still represent a propitious commercial market. While young people’s spending was unlikely to increase at a spectacular rate, Datamonitor forecast that growth would remain steady. In 2002, Datamonitor estimated, teenagers aged between 14 and 17 years old wielded a total income of €9.9 billion in Western Europe, a figure likely to climb to €10.8 billion by 2007 (equivalent to an annual average growth rate of 1.7 per cent). Over the same period, Datamonitor predicted, the total income of 18-to 24-year-olds in full-time education would rise from €114.7 billion to €133.0 billion, while the combined income of those in their first year of employment would grow from €33.8 billion to €34.9 billion (Datamonitor, 2003).
