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I still enjoyed seeing an HMV, walked into the tiny one in Stirling and (half jokingly) asked if they had any Kyuss. She walked me over to the Metal section (which I hadn't even seen) where they had three albums, happy days!
Given that everything is easy to find and instantly available online, I almost find relief in the totally arbitrary constraint of what is physically held in a store. Same with books to be honest. Still gives you a wee bit of childish excitement when you see that one album you've been meaning to buy for ages sitting on the shelf.
How will HMV's woes affect Fopp?
My wife noticed the other day that our new car doesn't have a cd player. Meh.
Tell her not to worry, lots of indie labels are putting out albums on cassette again.
These two articles show exactly why streaming music is really theft from the artists, and why the loss of high street stores like HMV is a critical loss to the music industry.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/30/demand-for-creativity-on-the-cheap-is-destroying-music-industry-hmv
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/30/hmv-is-a-bedrock-of-the-british-music-industry-its-loss-would-affect-us-all
This is where brands such as HMV come in – high-street retail representatives of an old-school music culture that was, in myriad ways, stupid, depressing, corrupt, bloated and ridiculous. But at least back then people realised that, when they wanted music, they first had to pay for it. Home taping or bootlegging were about as cheeky as it got. Now, that automatic consumer decency has gone – at some point, people convinced themselves that they didn’t have to pay as much (or at all) for certain modes of entertainment.
Whatever this attitude is (exciting and contemporary? Or cheapskate, depressing and tantamount to the industrial undermining of an art form? Discuss), it’s a genie that’s well and truly out of the music industry bottle, and HMV looks like becoming its latest victim. Certainly, it comes to something when the only things as bloated, ridiculous and corrupt as the music industry are the lazy, over-entitled consumers themselves.
How will HMV’s woes affect Fopp?
Difficult to say, but I think Fopp are run independently from the parent company, so will probably be ok. It would be nice to think that if HMV shops close, Fopp might open smaller shops in those places, or maybe Rough Trade might open a few more shops. There’s an HMV in Bath, but no other record shops at all, whereas there were two Fopp stores, which was part of Fopp’s original problem. Bath has a lot of empty shops, a Fopp or Rough Trade in one of them would be perfect, save a fifty mile round trip to Bristol.
and from 2007
Sir Richard Branson has sold his Virgin Megastores business to a management buy-out team, severing the last of his ties with the high street.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/sep/17/citynews.musicnews
The Wikipedia page about zavvi is worth a read! Brought down by woolies, who'd a thunk it?