Friday 8 April 2011

Is HMV's Time Up?

As someone who seemed to spend their young life rushing to music shops to buy first-day-of-release LPs and then dashing home clutching the huge cardboard cover in my hot sticky mitts, I’ve never really got over the thrill of record shop browsing.  Even though I now buy virtually all my music on-line either as a download or, more usually, as a CD I can hold in my still warm hand, the lure of the high street shop remains strong.

So it was with a degree of sadness that I turned up at HMV near Bond Street tube the other week only to be met with a paper notice sellotaped to the wall saying, ‘This store will close on 5 March’.  I have to admit that the news wasn’t a complete surprise.  The store had had that aura of an old unkempt dog shuffling around waiting to die for some time.  The Virgin Store at the other end of Oxford Street had had the same feel about it before it handed over to the short-lived Zavvi some years before.

There is something unbearably distressing about the death throes of a music store.  Where it was once vibrant and relevant, it just becomes scruffier and scruffier, gives up trying to stay on top of new releases, has endless bargain bins and descends downmarket into the sale of T-shirts and tacky tourist items rather than proper music which then gets shoved to the upper/lower floors like some unwanted embarrassment.

But mixed in amongst the sadness is a little annoyance.  HMV have really had it coming.  Their pricing policy has had a head-in-the-sand quality about it ever since the rise of Amazon and their ilk, years ago.  Even with their closing down notice on the wall and a pervading ‘everything must go’ feel about the place their ‘sale’ items were still more expensive than on-line sellers.  It just beggars belief.  As intimated above, I have long since given up buying anything from HMV because their prices are way too high.  Surely in their time of closure they could give some of us old hands a few bargains?  But no.

OK, I understand that shops with overheads cannot compete with on-line sellers but the premium HMV is asking for instant access is just too high.  Another example: In a desire to get my browsing fix, I subsequently visited the HMV in the basement of Selfridges Department Store and noted to my utter amazement that the Star Trek Original Series 1 remastered DVD set I bought for £12.50 from Amazon was being offered at £50.  I mean, FIFTY QUID!  Perhaps Selfridge’s customers don’t care about this sort of money, but I do.

In my more uncharitable moments, I think that HMV deserves to die.

11 comments:

Adrian said...

Perhaps I have been so busy enjoying pie over the years, I have missed this before... Or, it could be that none of the shops here in Canada has included the dog and the record-player...

The association of the imagery and HMV tells me what you, and all, likely have long known - the acronym must stand for "His Master's Voice"!

In which case, not only is it the loss of a record shop, it's the loss of a loyal and acute ear!

music obsessive said...

Hi Adrian - HMV is the last big music store chain in the UK and it looks like it's on its last legs (or paws). Many stores have closed but it limps on. Where am I going to browse now?

Adrian said...

Aye, that is a loss.

I will not add to the mourning by barking about how the record industry killed the golden goose.

That would be mixing too many metaphors!

Arf!!

Zee said...

Hahahaha, your last line made me crack up: "I think that HMV deserves to die"
Guess it's true though. HMV is quite overpriced. I'll only ever buy from a record shop if it's cheap and HMV is usually far from it. I guess it's still sad though, because the death of HMV might soon enough mean us saying goodbye record shops. Not now anyway, but perhaps in the future.

music obsessive said...

Hi Zee - Yes, I can see record shops becoming more 'underground' and only selling specialist stuff. The same happened to comics. Once you could buy them everywhere, but now only from specialist shops. Shame.

Alan said...

I'm surprised you think of HMV as a record store. The few to which I have regular access are, in my opinion, just DVD stores with a few CDs in a dirty corner at the back of the store.

I gave up on them a long time ago.

music obsessive said...

Hi Alan. The one at Bond Street looked to be in breach of its title as a music store a few months ago when it moved all its CDs to the first floor and used the ground floor for T shirts, books and iPod accessories. It was obvious the end was in sight.

Nobody's really interested in selling CDs on the high street these days.

YourZenMine said...

In Australia, HMV has long gone, closing 32 stores around this wide brown land to 'focus on the UK, Irish, Canadian and Asian markets'. I think I can count on one hand how many times I went to HMV anyway, so it was no great loss to me. Like you, though, I love browsing for music but there are so few stores these days that let you stop and listen to something new. I have to take a bus into the city (about 20 minutes) to find one such store and even then, it seems to cater mostly for the pop market. Buying online is much easier, these days.

music obsessive said...

YourZ - haha! So much for focussing on the UK! I have to admit I buy most of my stuff on-line these days but I'm going to miss browsing and actually getting your hands on the product!

Brett said...

I am lucky enough to have a couple of record stores in my area that deal with the prog stuff I like. They will also order for you at no extra cost. I still like to browse. Maybe I am old school but I like to look at cover art, lyrics, and the other tid bits within the cd booklet. I have an ipod which I love but there are those times I like to listen to an album from front to back, especially concept albums.

music obsessive said...

Brett - there's nothing quite like the feel of an LP, or even cds at a pinch. MP3 files don't quite do it, do they?