HMV

I've read many things about HMV over the past few years and that downward spiral was pretty obvious, but it's perhaps the severity and speed that wasn't.

What is irritating is the way people dance on it's potential grave from music lovers to the media at large.

We in the UK love bad news, so instead of perhaps (heaven forbid), looking for ways to help, we just seem to revel in the things that are wrong.

Music lovers blame the megastore for the loss of the Independent Music Shop, the place where we hung out in earlier years and made a lot of our friends and built a lot of our musical tastes. So now they revel in the downfall of the company.

HMV didn't close the indy, it was a gradual thing over a generation. It's too simplistic to blame a big store with a large stock that still didn't have what you necessarily wanted and when it did, it was top dollar to get it.

It started with vinyl's demise, the compact disc was just not as precious, then came the upsurge of the Record Fair in the Nineties, you could spend a day and see nigh on a hundred different dealers. There was bound to be a dealer who specialised in just the sort of genre you wanted.

Then came Mail Order and you could find hundreds of specialists just by paying a few quid for the Record Collector Magazine and their overheads were much lower.

Finally came the internet and Apple and that's were the story of bricks and mortar largely ended.

We forget other things, Record Companies releasing singles to Radio seven or eight weeks before they had an official release. It didn't create demand in most cases, it just meant you were sick of them by the time they were released and the singles market just went tits up.

Having said all that, what about HMV now? Well I believe there could be a future.

Physical product is over, I'm a massive collector and rarely buy a cd now unless it's by a band that I have lots of albums on the shelves of.

I love the ipod, it's convenience, managing stuff on the pc is a pain, I don't have the love of an album that I did when I could hold it, but I have convenience.

So if HMV are not going to sell physical product, why have a store? Well they will have to downscale in size, but they could go back to the past to find the future.

Record Shops were meeting places, HMV can be that too. If most of the product is downloaded, well let people download in store, have bands perform, promo appearances, make it the place to be, to spend a morning at.

There'd be a loyalty to HMV because of the part it could play in people's lives. People would download from HMV and maybe buy their next phone, ipod, hard drive whatever from there.

The current generation of teens are lost, but the generation before them aren't. There's nothing in town for them at all yet.

All a bit pie in the sky, well it may seem that way, but one retailer nearly did it.

When Zavvi took on the Virgin Megastores, they were sinking fast. They re-invented themselves, made a store that gangs of teenagers were encouraged to spend hours in, not forced to move on if they didn't spend.

They had loads of Games Machines and Listening Posts for customers to while away hours on. The result was that when they did buy something and the Wii was the hot thing that year, they bought it from Zavvi.

It was building up one hell of a reputation and it was mainly Woolworths demise just before Christmas that cut off it's source of supply that did for it.

It may not have worked but it seemed to be giving itself a chance.

For HMV to do this, it would have to change it's management and Store Management. HMV used to have managers who loved the product and knew the local market, now it's Managers could be running anything from a supermarket to Superdrug.

It is one way forward, because you cannot keep doing the same in a rapidly declining market and not expect the same results.