Does anyone still shop at HMV?

hmm : http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/17/hmvgroupbusiness

even more annoying is the fact in the central Bristol HMV, the Electronic/Dance section has been amalgamated into the rock-n-pop section making it murder to find anything new and interesting.
Oh, and of course there is even more floorspace dedicated to bloody DVDs even though the upstairs is all DVD now.

Looked in at the Glasgow HMV branches when I was up there over Christmas and as usual I was reminded how shockingly bad HMV shops are in general when compared to the Oxford Circus one. It's as if they decided to have one Tesco's supermarket and then the rest are just TescoExpress branches; if you don't want something in the Top 40 or anything else that isn't the bleeding obvious, you've had it.

HMV Glasgow is still a lot better than Virgin/Zavvi's shops. That big Zavvi in Buchanan st is a huge shop with lots of space and whatever stock there is, is crap.
That shop could be crammed with loads of great cds and vinyl from all genres and be the best damn record shop in the country.

I used their website a few times, mainly for presents rather than myself, until they were a bit useless and I got angry (rant somewhere on another thread).

Bought someone a Christmas present in the Oxford branch when I realised at v short notice that he'd probably really like and not already know about the Tuss mini-album thing (and also the Vitalic live thing, but they didn't have that).

Then I got a voucher for Christmas and they didn't have most of what I was looking for but I was pleased to find Pissed Jeans and Harmonia Live 1974.

So, not much, but I'll be annoyed if it goes as we now have no independent music shops and I would rather give money to HMV than to, ahem, "Zavvi".

Current sale is crap

Worryingly so

No sale at all in the Bristol branch other than the usual "2 for a tenner" deals, but thats not a sale is it.
oh hang on, Airs debut is for £4 .. guess that qualifies as a sale.
Just.
Its actually very depressing how the Bristol record shop situation has been totally decimated in recent times, making the current state of HMV a very important factor for us lunch hour shoppers.

And of course, whether HMV or Virgin (I refuse to use that stinking other meaningless name), one still gets asked "Did you find everything you were looking for?"

"No - you didn't have the El Grincho album."

"Uuuuuuuhhhhhh?????"

This is why we have to say "yes" every time.

In Oxford HMV about a week into Jan there was no CD sale, just a single stand of "sale" DVDs (mostly sitcoms, not particularly cheap).

x-post

No Replay, no Imperial. When I lived in Bristol between 1996 and 2000, and even for a few years afterwards, both those shops were excellent, then they closed very quickly.

No Replay, no Imperial. When I lived in Bristol between 1996 and 2000, and even for a few years afterwards, both those shops were excellent, then they closed very quickly.

then followed by the ok-ish Disc-n-Tape, and of course the various Fopp outlets.

only Rooted left for the dubstep crew, but little else now.

HMV or Virgin sales are the same sales as 10 years ago but with added £2 off recent albums.
The only difference between then and now perhaps is lots of dvds in the sale.
Stock a better range of cds and vinyls and perhaps sales wont go down. Most of the time i dont even bother browsing hmv/zavvi because I know they wont stock what I have and the sales are predictable.

HMV or Virgin sales are the same sales as 10 years ago

Absolutely not true, not even the same as two years ago

Yes it's possible I might still get a Henry Flynt CD (to name but one of hundreds) in a sale in Zavvi... but unlikely on current evidence

I mean its the same old Dylan/RHCP cds in the sales now that were in it 10 years ago.

Yes, but where's all the other stuff? Landfill?

In the case of Rudebox, yes.

"The sidewalks in the street
The 'Rudebox' and Spiritualized beneath my feet
Begins to crumble..."

They're doomed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11956003

"Furthermore, moves to diversify the product offering smack of desperation, with competition in clothing and electrical products already hugely intense."

They're offering Smack? oh wait...

Hope Waterstone's can be saved from this mess, losses don't sound nearly as bad.

£12 for the Neon Neon album? No wonder they're in trouble.

This might have been discussed upthread, and I remember chuntering about it on the Zavvi thread, but the pricing difference between the IRL stores and online is (in some cases) so absurd that this must be part of the reason for their problems.

eg. The HMV in Manchester can charge as much as £27.99 for a single film on blu-ray, with the result that I will go online and buy it for £12 instead (and not from HMV.com). If the instore price were more like £15 then I would just buy it whilst browsing. I know that the overheads of running a shop are part of the reason for this, but it feels like the management of this chain, with this kind of pricing policy, are *willing* it to fail (who knows, maybe that's their actual aim?).

Should've included a "dorian otm" at the start of that, I'm just expanding on yr point really.

Right, so they are talking about closing 60 shops.

No list so far.

Why the indie world still needs HMV.

Surely £50 bloke is far more likely to waste his money Bright Eyes downloads via iTunes?

*on*

I suspect many of us ARE £50 bloke, more or less.

http://sickmouthy.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/hmv/

Oh,

1) See you got the Boos Giant Steps 3CD. Did our 'sleevenotes' make it to the package? (That would be cool, I just got the "T.Rex on TV" DVD so I could take both home, and go "oh, I'm on both of those"

2) HMV used to be that one big store in Oxford Road, a once-a-year treat back when. Search all three (four?) floors for treasure... Now they are everywhere, and sell nowt.

The stuff Martin gathered up for the 10th anniversary site? Sadly no...

I just got the "T.Rex on TV" DVD so I could take both home, and go "oh, I'm on both of those"

ok, given that this is the second mention of this, i have to bite.

whats the story mark re you and t-rex ?

Well, basically I was part of the "London" TV region panel on the first series of "Pop Quest", a pop quiz show, back in 1975, and Marc was the guest star.

more recently, I found out that there was a DVD coming out with his appearances (mostly performances) on TV, including his interview from this show. I asked the producers of the DVD about it, and they asked me to write about my experience, and they did send me a DVD copy of the second half of the show which had the interview on.

great story.
ta.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12137330

It seems to me that they have only gotten comments from tracks/singles-fans though, which is a bit one-sided. I am still a fan of the album as a dominant format, and those of us who prefer albums also tend to prefer them in a physical format.

(And, btw... I still buy records at record stores, although HMV never had a shop in Norway)

Also, I don't know what it's like in the smaller HMV shops across Britan, and I can imagine the shops generally have fewer titles. But the back catalogue selections in the Trocadero and Oxford Circus shops were still rather impressive to me when I was in London in November. Not as good as Tower at Piccadilly used to be in the 90s, but still good enough, at least compared to what I am used to here (and the biggest Platekompaniet shop in Oslo is not so bad when it comes to back catalogue either).

well its shite in the giant superstore in Buchanan St in Glasgow.

May be the case. Those two record shops I referred to are probably the biggest in Europe, or at least in the UK (there may be some bigger ones in Germany), so no wonder if they seem more shite in other parts of the UK. Other HMV shops in London seemed rather shite too (although most of them seemed to be closed)

It was always crap in Aus. Big shops with full-price mainstream music in shallow racks, with a JB Hi-Fi next door selling six times the content at a 20-40% price reduction across the board. Gee wonder why that failed.

the glasgow one is huge, though i havent been in the london ones. but Glasgow is the 3rd biggest city in the UK.

xp

last time i was in it was all dvds + some sale cds that are always the same. Really shit "specialist" sections and the shop is really really bad for back catalogue (how i measure how good a record shop by). 4 floors of sod all

I went into the London ones but don't remember a thing about them, maybe because I was already sold on digital music by the time I got there (although I did buy the Schnappi album the week before in Berlin so)

(point of that post was to explain that the British HMVs I saw were totally unremarkable, which I should have said instead tbh)

I remember the Copenhagen HMV used to be really crappy. I expected something really grand, having been to the UK shops, and got really disappointed.

Now record stores in Copenhagen are shit though.

I mean MOST record stores in Copenhagen are shit.

Last time I was in Oxford St. HMV I was looking for a particular Sublime Frequencies release that was out of stock in my usual scouting places...and they had it!

Mind you, that was about five years ago. Haven't had a reason to go back since.

HMV Group said it would miss analysts’ expectations for full-year pre-tax profits of £45m because of a continued “challenging” trading conditions, sending its shares down more than 20 per cent.

The embattled music and entertainment retailer also warned it was in danger of breaching its banking covenants by June, its year-end, as debt climbed to at least £130m.

The company is already in talks with its lenders, it said in a trading update on Tuesday, and hopes to make changes to the agreement that will “ensure its appropriateness for future trading conditions and to support delivery of the group’s strategy”.

Analysts were more surprised by the debt figure than the difficult trading. It was “significantly higher than expected”, said Kate Calvert at Seymour Pierce. HMV blamed changes to its product mix and other working capital movements.

Shares in HMV fell 4¼p to 16½p in early London trading, a fresh 52-week low. The stock has lost more than three-quarters of its value over that period.