I'm not going to lie, of all the music retailers from yesteryear HMV was my least favourite. In the small town near where I grew up the record shops were Our Price and HMV and I much preferred Our Price. Further afield I would say Andy's Records was my favourite of the chains.
When I went to university I would shop at the independent record shops more, but when I did shop at the chains HMV was probably the one I used the least. With your NUS card you could get a 10% discount at HMV, but one day in my final year I went to buy a CD that was £7 but they wouldn't give me a 10% discount, it now only could be applied to the full price £17 CDs, so I didn't buy it and eventually bought it at Virgin Megastore for £5.
The internet is being blamed once again and whilst it is a factor, there were always other ways to buy CDs besides the record shop before internet shopping became popular. You had Woolworths and WH Smith, supermarkets and second hand shops like Cash Converters. Most of the music I bought as a teenager was Tape Packs direct from rave promoters.
The total number of CDs/Tapes/Vinyl I've bought in my lifetime is over 1000. I prefer to own music in a physical format and I prefer to go and buy it from a shop rather than on the internet. Despite this, I am part of the problem. I was there that final Sunday afternoon at the big store in Oxford St before it moved down the road to a smaller building, I bought several CDs that day but I don't think I've bought anything from HMV since.
I have visited the new Oxford St store, it looked like their solution was to sell classic albums on vinyl for £25 each. This might appeal to vinyl fanatics, but for the general public how many people would pay £25 for something they could listen to on Spotify for free?
The problem is that the albums they sell for a reasonable price are ones you can get elsewhere even cheaper and the more expensive ones don't sell. More than a decade ago I would regularly visit the HMV near to where I worked at the time for 2 years. I saw the Nuyorican Soul album in there on my first visit but didn't buy it as it was £18, in my last visit 2 years later it still hadn't sold and you could tell it was the same CD because it had a small scratch on the cover.
When I went to the big Oxford St store for the first time I thought it was amazing. Every album I could think of, no matter how obscure, was there. It was the first time I'd seen a Sander Kleinenberg CD in a record shop. Unfortunately that Sander Kleinenberg CD was £20.
Today they no longer have that big store and the CD section in their new Oxford St store is no bigger than any other store really. I thought I'd take a look on their website today and searched Sander Kleinenberg and here's what I got:
Not very helpful at all. Even when you browse music in general on their website, you can order by price, release date or relevance but you can't sort in alphabetical order. You can filter by artist, but the artists aren't listed in alphabetical order either.
When they were closing down the big Oxford St store they just had the CDs in any random order so the only way to find them was to look through them all, there may have been CDs I wanted to buy that I didn't find.
Whilst it's easy to pick faults, it's not easy knowing what the solution is. An 18 year old now would have been born in the year 2000, they would have only known a world of downloads and streaming so how would you appeal to them?
As someone who prefers the physical format, I can't think of too many albums from recent years that I want and that would be the case for many people over a certain age. With older albums there is a second hand market where you can get them really cheap, the last CD I bought was from poundland and you have second hand CDs on Amazon that cost 1p plus postage. Yes they are pre-owned, but having bought new CDs from HMV where the case is already knackered before I've even taken the CD out it doesn't make an awful lot of difference.
Amazon of course is a big problem for many traditional retailers, but it was also a problem for rival online music retailers such as play.com who are no more even though they were better in my opinion. Again I am part of the problem, I do buy music from Amazon but mainly because I always seem to have Amazon vouchers. The card I have registered with them expired in 2011, that gives an idea of how long it's been since I last spent any of my own money with them as opposed to gift cards.
Another factor is the rise of gig prices. As recent as 10 years ago I could go to see someone quite popular for £20 a ticket and £2.50 a pint, so if one was to drink 6 pints that's £35 for the night. Those same gigs are now costing £60 a ticket and at the O2 the price of a pint is now £7, so that's £102 for the night i.e. an extra £67 that could have been spent on CDs.
If I was writing this 20 years ago the demise of HMV probably wouldn't have bothered me as you still had Andy's Records, Our Price, Virgin Megastore etc but now they've all gone and HMV is the last one left I really hope they survive.
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