I often walk past the former HMV store in Moorgate ( in the City of That London) and wonder how much longer the reborn company has left in it, what with Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, You Tube et al, let alone pirate downloads. even the supermarkets don’t seem to be that bothered about selling shiny silver discs in quite the same way they were before. In an idle moment, I had a look to see how HMV are doing and was surprised, nay astonished, to find that the company is in rude health. How can this be? I almost never go in to my local store as Spotify/Netflix/Amazon are able to provide most of what I need.
What’s going on? Are HMV being fattened up for a strategically timely sale or is it really still possible to sell music and film on the high street?
I wouldn’t want to, see them go again but I had them marked as another lame duck struggling against the inevitable (see also Morrison’s. I give it five years or less before they’re bought by Aldi or Lidl.)
HMV (again)
by 37 Comments
There’s still a big big market for physical product, either audio or visual.
Senior store managers seem to allow the local staff to imprint some personality on the stores too, so it isn’t just like a faceless unit shifter. I was in the Leeds store on Saturday and was gobsmacked how good it looked and ‘felt’ – in between the usual corporate Universal ads were hand drawn band signs, recommendations and some great tracks playing too, clearly not corporate playlists. Far more like Fopp than a pre crash HMV.
Hope they thrive
I normally pop into the Bond Street HMV after a Fopp (Cambridge Circus), Berwick Street, The Champion pub (the one with the stained-glass windows) wander……other London wanders are available.
It’s quite good for special offers, those Beach Boys twofers were £2.99 so I got the one I was missing, but the clientele is what I imagine goes to Stamford Bridge on a Sunday lunch-time and I never hang around too long.
Alas, HMV is now really bad for rock ‘n’ roll, a subject the Tottenham Court Road/Oxford Circus branch used to be so strong on.
Currently, if you look through the, say, eight Chuck Berry CDs, they will all be the same one (!) and it will be a cheap out-of-copyright job.
In the old branch, they always had the latest Ace rock ‘n’ roll releases and a listening post, even at £12 I’d always get one when I was there.
*groan* – completely off topic, but I just had an ‘idiotic eureka moment’ as Frank Skinner calls it, when the penny drops on something really, really late.
I now know where Buck Cherry got their name.
Where…?
HMV, obv.
I am not so sure there is much of a market for visual product beyond the short-term, but we shall see.
I guess that in the present HMV might well be doing ok having a) got rid of most of its branches and presumably focussed on wealthier areas / the big shopping malls. And it won’t have.much, if any , competition in the latter.
My local (King’s Lynn) seems to be doing well and has certainly seen vast improvement over the past 12 months not least a decent selection of reasonably priced vinyl and a vast selection of DVDs. I was in yesterday and boosted their takings to the tune of £50 or so. I think the last time I mentioned them on here was about this time last year after being kept waiting for 15 minutes at the till whilst one assistant was trying to cope with a queue who appeared incapable of finding anything for themselves – yesterday was a much better experience.
I suspect that there will be a ‘need’ for HMV for many a year yet because whilst ‘us’ on here have a healthy(?) knowledge and interest in music (and I think are all knocking on a bit in years!) we are in a minority.
I would hazard a guess the majority of people over 40, if they have any interest in music, get all they need from what they hear on tv or commercial radio. If something REALLY catches their ear they probably try to track it down in HMV or their local supermarket and buy the cd, take it home and listen to it a few times. Nothing wrong with that for them of course.
HMV was seen as strategically important by various areas of the music/TV/film industries, and was therefore propped up during its difficult period and given time to reorganise. They’ve done so very well, under clever management, and have started to differentiate their offering against the online experience, which is the key to survival.
I can’t speak for music, but on the film and TV side, physical (DVD and BD) still accounts for a surprisingly high percentage of content sale revenues. While these sales are diminishing year on year, it’s not as quick as you’d think, and the current forecast is that there will continue to be demand well into the future.
No idea if the above will be enough to sustain HMV long term, but I hope so – it’s great to see chains like this and Waterstones turning their fortunes around and zoning in on what their consumers actually want from them.
Makes me wonder whether, if there had been the same determination to sustain it, Top Of The Pops might have survived its own storm, not as weekday centrepiece TV but still there for the interested..
Music sales are interesting at the moment. In a nutshell, the decline in physical has all but stopped (and if Adele does what people think you might even see actual growth this year and next). It’s digital sales that are plummeting – streaming has eaten right into this market, but the people who stuck with physical through the heyday of digital don’t seem to be getting tempted by the idea of paying to not own any music.
Why oh why do these people who listen to streamed music keep having a go at shops like HMV and physical music product?
It`s a known fact that a massive proportion of people who listen to “fresh air” music never contribute a penny to the cost accumulated by musicians who create the music they greedily listen to.
*snort*
Look here, Grandad, don’t you know real artists like giving their work away for nothing? Get with the program!*
* not the opinion of this poster
Meet me outside snot gobbler and I`ll show how “grandad” can handle himself!!!
I’m not having a go at HMV. My curiosity was aroused because Moorgate is a busy area that supports lots of retail and yet the store closed. HMV was near the Tube station and it’s hard to imagine a better location for lunchtime browsing and impulse buys. My local store is not great. Brighton is better but involves a 30 mile round trip plus parking. I wouldn’t do that just to browse in HMV and Resident.
Bingo’s post answers my query and explains why the reborn business concentrates on DVD so heavily.
Message for @davebigpicture Resident is now twice as big, they have taken over the frozen yogurt shop next door.
Plenty of space now for CDs and Vinyl and now they have two tills!
It is fairly easy for me to visit as I work in Hove but Brighton isn’t the easiest or cheapest to park but this may make it a bit more worthwhile.
Thanks. I didn’t know.
I paid a far too brief visit to Resident on our way to Brighton Station on Thursday morning. Talk about a pilgrim visiting a holy spot!”
Among my purchases, was the new album by this local band, Shopping.
Only speculation, but I’d be about 90% sure that Moorgate closed because of the rent demands for the area. That’s the single biggest overhead for any retailer, and if you can’t make them work, you haven’t got a business.
Have to agree with my friend the Baron on this. Streaming and downloading still play second fiddle in my life and always will. What’s the point of an mp3 download when you can buy the physical product for a similar price and copy it onto your mp3 player anyway if thats’s what floats your boat. Even on this site I am surprised at the number of people who seemingly want someone like HMV to fail. I can’t get to HMV that often these days as the nearest one is a 20 mile car journey away. However the 5 or 6 times I have visited this year I have been pleasantly surprised. Good stock at good prices.
The same goes with Uncut and Mojo – I thought this site started primarily for music matters yet there again there are people that would want to see the back of these magazines. Why? Last months Mojo was superb and not just for the Costello interview.
I don’t want HMV to fail. I was just genuinely surprised that they’re doing so well but I still don’t believe they can survive long term. I don’t buy much physical product these days but without HMV there would be almost no record shops between Resident in Brighton and Pies and Vinyl In Southsea. It’s great to hear that there are good HMV branches but I don’t live very near one.
I do both. I buy books, music and film as physical artefacts and I buy the digital equivalents.
Why settle for one or the other when one can indulge in both?
Nowt up with that Peter, I`m not having a go at streamed/downloaded music, each to their own. It`s the berks who are only too happy to gleefully crow about the downfall of record stores and physical music product that wind me up.
I also buy the physical product, and this Friday, a.k.a. ‘Beatles and Dylan day’, at least I know for sure (erm….almost for sure) that the HMV in Stratford will stock ‘1’ and ’65/’66’.
A not inconsiderable advantage over a supermarket which might but probably won’t.
That Dylan thing? I can understand some people wanting to buy that in one form/edition or another but ‘1’ ?!?!? For goodness sake how many times are people stupid enough to keep buying the same things over and over again?
Because the promo films have never been properly released before.
Because it`s The Fucking Beatles and because!
The HMV in central Southampton seems to be thriving in all departments. It’s cliental? In the main 40-60.
I think they are now owned by HMV Canada. Here in Canada they closed probably up to half the stores. Most left are in shopping malls. They never seem particularly busy when I visit, expect they hope to make enough in next 2 months to stay afloat. Meanwhile the vinyl section keeps expanding, but prices very high.
not owned by HMV Canada, but owned by the same company that owns HMV Canada
I’m in Horsham and our HMV – in the main shopping street – survived the crash and was doing well; until their lease ran out and they were outbid by an outdoor clothing chain. The store staff were very unhappy as they reckoned they were bringing in customers across the range and the audio was going especially well. So now we have nothing and I have to go to either Crawley or Brighton. As @davebig picture points out, either of these involves driving and parking, which is not ideal. As a result, my music shopping tends to be on line – physically through the tax dodgers or through streaming. The occasion visit to Brighton is when I can sniff the real thing again!
I’m a regular visitor to HMV in Southampton. It’s spread over 3 floors, and arguably the ground floor is still hugely wasted by racks of chart material and special offers, but the music section which is squashed into the basement is arguably better than it has ever been, with a huge amount of vinyl and specialist music sitting alongside deep catalogue material on CD – far more than just chart stuff that you can find in the local ASDA. And the prices are all significantly lower than pre-crash HMV, and quite often cheaper than those available on Amazon. There’s a reasonably good classical section as well. There is clearly local autonomy at work, which is healthy and excellent to see. I went for years ignoring HMV, but am now back to spending a fortune in there. Trouble is, I spend a fortune online as well – something’s gotta give!
Yep, because the promo films (the best ‘videos’ made by any group ever, yes Queen, yes Ultravox, yes Duran Duran – all yours were crap compared to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’) have never been made available before and, in a world of 33 CD box sets of Bananarama, it is a vital and relatively inexpensive release.
HMV, as many of you are probably aware now operate on line and their prices are often cheaper than Amazon especially in new music product. Example the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 12 is £30 cheaper than Amazon.
I was trying to track down some CDs recently and having exhausted Amazon, ebay, the local libraries etc I popped into HMV oxford Street and out of the 6 I was looking for they stocked …. none. Not the one. I guess they are very mainstream these days and just stock the more commercial artists.
Tbf Amazon and ebay both had some but at stupid prices.
Eventually I found Discogs (http://www.discogs.com)and got 3 of them all at decent prices, and found a couple of the others at scattered libraries across London.
The Reading Branch has got better over the past year or so – still not great, but not the comedy adventure it once was.
Pricing, when compared to on-line, is still a major issue (although new releases are at least comparable in price, unlike back catalogue which is still sometimes laughably over priced).
Still find the independents in and around Reading are better places to visit for a mooch about – HMV is good if you know exactly what you’re looking for, rather than hoping to stumble across something.
One thing I did notice on my last visit – they have reduced the size of the electronics and gadgetry section. However, the saved space has been given over to over-priced vinyl.
I still visit HMV whenever I’m passing – although rather than a “must”, it is more out of a sense of habit (and the opportunity to annoy Mrs D)
The High Wycombe branch has a surprising amount of back catalogue in a smallish rack space. Good on them. Someone in charge seems to have twigged that balding herberts enjoy a browse and will often hoof out the cash on a day out shopping, almost in gratitude that the opportunity to do so still exists.