“The store has a dedicated floor for vinyl records and CDs”
Whatever will they think of next?
Record shop opens
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
by 32 Comments
“The store has a dedicated floor for vinyl records and CDs”
Whatever will they think of next?
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I bought my US pressing of Stop Making Sense in there on import. It came out months before the UK release.
It’s certainly not obvious from the shop windows of the HMV shops in Watford and Norwich that they even sell records and CDs
I was very happy to see HMV reopened on Henry St in Dublin on a visit last month. I ditched my family in Arnott’s department store next door and told them I would be some time. There were lots of merch and merch and more merch. I didn’t find any music.
It’s up on the top floor, something of an afterthought in a shop that’s an absolute travesty of the brand. Fortunately the other stores don’t seem to have gone the same way, though high margin merch is a bigger part of the make up now. Dublin didn’t even sell DVD/Blu-ray when I was in last.
I wonder if they’ll pay back any of the money allegedly lost by Ace Records when they folded so short a time ago?
Good luck to them – I used to work for a company whose head office was above The Body Shop premises, a little way up Oxford Street from the HMV. My lunchtimes could be expensive whenever i was tempted into descending to the basement floor, where it seemed that at som point during my visit they would alway play something that drew me in. I’d listen to it on the ‘phones attached to one of the pillars and almost inevitably walk back to the office with a new purchase.
How dare they besmirch the home of dodgy American Sweets shops with this rock filth?
I wish them well – very positive news
I can’t imagine how difficult it is to keep a music-related shop afloat in this day and age, but I’m unsure what market(s) HMV is aimed at.
In my local branch, the first third of the ground floor is full of K-pop, J-pop, and anime material. I’m guessing this is aimed at teens, but I rarely see young people in the shop, let alone buying a BTS CD or Blackpink merch. The remainder is band T-shirts, bits of cult merch, and then DVDs and Blu-Rays. The music is all upstairs, a space that is increasingly being taken over by vinlys, with CDs becoming an afterthought. I have zero interest in vinlys (£30-40 for an LP? Really? I don’t care if it’s been half-speed mastered at Abbey Road, thank you – its sound cannot come close to the clarity and openness of a CD costing maybe a quarter of the price), and keep going to HMV more out of habit than in the expectation that they will have a CD I want.
If it wasn’t for their occasional good sales, and the lack of brick-and-mortar competition (I don’t want to buy everything from Amazon), I wouldn’t go in there at all.
The total ambivalence to a huge number of potential customers who still all own CD players is astonishing.
In my local town, if a cache of CDs is rumoured to be residing on a shelf at a local chazzer, middle-aged men rugby-tackle each other to get to it first.
This is completely and utterly lost on the record industry.
“keep going to HMV more out of habit than in the expectation” – me too, often leave there empty-handed (unheard of before, when I used to find something of possible interest.
And if I do find what I’m looking for, I will usually find it’s 2 or 3 quid cheaper on Amazon.
End of year sales – often 2 for £15 – may restore the bag bulging in HMV
I’m regularly leaving there empty-handed and disappointed. My taste is certainly not mainstream, but their selection of CDs is becoming so narrow that Amazon and (on rare occasions) iTunes have become my go-to sources for practically every artist. When HMV do stock somebody I like, there might be one copy of only their latest album. Once that’s sold, that’s it.
I’ll be sad when HMV closes for good, but not surprised.
Captain why are they going to close when they are profitable?
The pessimism around here is frankly depressing.
Your own experience must be contrary to reality else why would they reopen Oxford street?
I doubt it is a vanity project.
I can only speak about my local store, as it’s the only one I visit, but compared to how it used to be it’s very, very quiet. It’s in a prime (costly) city centre site, but it is very rarely crowded and there is never a queue at the till.
Maybe other branches are doing much better. I do hope the company flourishes.
“the store has a floor dedicated to a live stage, with individual floors for vinyl, pop culture and DVDs”
So that’s one floor out of four dedicated to music.
I heard HMV boss Doug Putman on the wireless the other evening. Two things struck me: (i) this shop is going to have (a total of?) 20,000 records & CDs, which didn’t seem much to me for a flagship store – it’s hardly Tower Records, is it? (ii) HMV is back in profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll definitely pop in for a browse when I’m up That London, but I won’t be going out of my way to spend all day Saturday in there as I once used to.
Pretty much how I see it too.
I sigh wistfully for the days when I could stroll into Tower of a lunchtime and stagger back out several hours later with a good haul in a placcy bag and a train to catch before I could hear any of it; a splendid treat at the end of a day in air-pollution-central.
Bit of a sweeping statement there about sound quality. I would say “openness” can be witnessed at least as good (or better) on vinyl. Depends a lot on the mastering, but many CDs these days have very compressed audio. And of course playback equipment is crucial, a well mastered vinyl record sounds amazing
…but so does a well-mastered CD. Either format can carry good audio if it’s done properly. The one doesn’t have to negate the other.
Just a casual browse on almost any album’s page on Discogs.com will reveal tales of badly-pressed vinyl that has had to be returned for either refund or replacement. Right there you have the weakest link in current vinyl production. Expense and poor reliability do not go well together.
Yes, I didn’t claim vinyl sounded better all the time. Was responding to a claim that CD always sounds better. No doubt sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t
And so, yes, some expressing plants have big quality issues and new vinyl can have issues.
I think vinyl is back in popularity not just for sound, but the packaging is far superior and the ritual of putting a record on is very comforting. Digital is somehow different
I agree about the packaging – some LPs look beautiful, and a small CD box cannot match that.
But on my (admittedly cheap) turntable back in the day, LPs sounded muddy. Listening to my first CD was a revelation. I understand LP quality has improved dramatically, but a combination of factors – price, the above-mentioned pressing plant issues, having to turn the record over mid-album – mean that I’m not really interested in going down that road to investigate for myself.
My not-particularly-expensive set-up makes CDs sound crystal clear to me, and I’m sticking with that.
Sound for pound, a low-price CD player will probably sound better than a similarly-priced turntable, all other variables (mastering, etc) being equal.
CD is a very old (late ’70s/early ’80s) technology and even a mid-price CD player can reveal the limits of CD technology. I don’t use my ZX Spectrum computer any more, but that’s where CD development stopped.
Vinyl playback can sound better than CD, but it won’t be cheap. Being an electro-mechanical system, it can be continuously improved. Enough 1% gains, at the limits of technology, can add up to something substantial.
1% gains is what Team GB did in preparation for the 2012 Olympics, and Team Sky’s cycling team did, and both took home several gold medals. A modern athlete will perform better than one from 1984.
Well one from 1984 will be about 60 by now, so that’s hardly a fair competition.
This thread is like a flashback to the letters pages in hifi mags, about 35 years ago…
It’s when we start discussing the “benefits” of putting CDs in the fridge and/or adding green ink (or was it red?) to their surface that we’ll really know that we’ve gone back to those heady discussions about improving their sound.
*Cough* Peter *cough* Belt.
My favourite bit of recent-ish audio snakeoil is cable risers. Apparently raising audio cables I.e. speaker cables off the ground by utilising “special” little stands improves SQ.
Can’t say I’ve tried this so maybe I’m being unfair but I doubt it somehow.
Don’t be completely ridiculous. Freezer, not fridge!
@pencilsqueezer little stands are ridiculous everyone ‘knows’ you should hang the cables from skyhooks.
Well, what do you expect? I use a turntable from 1972 connected to an amplifier from 1975 driving speakers based upon a 1934 patent.
Ah, but have you got tinfoil on your curtains?
Don’t get me started! Exhibit A – Quad IIs!
May have been Gareth Edwards who was asked who would win in a match between a Welsh team from his era and a recent Grand Slam winning one, he said “it would be close but I think we would edge it, but we are all pushing 70 now!”
Never buy the blighters myself these days, but can I recommend an independent record shop where you can fill your boots with vinyl and spare yourselves the pain of discovering that HMV isn’t what it was? An example that comes to mind is Dreamhouse Records* in London’s ever-trendier Leyton. Exquisitely curated new and used vinyl in-store and by mail order, Perky Blenders coffee and bagels (not mail order), regular album launches, quizzes and so on – some people just never leave. https://dreamhouseldn.com
*Yes, it’s the son-in-law’s.