Why Music Needs HMV

First, let's just have some perspective. HMV's announcement today is a long way from saying they are going out of business. All they have said is that profits (and remember that is still profits, not losses) will be at the lower end of expectation and that they are going to close a tranche of loss making or less profitable stores. This is prudency. If Wooloworths' had had that kind of foresight, they might still be in business. But let's imagine if they did go out of business...

HMV is something of a quandary. To some it is a vital source of music and entertainment and for those not blessed with living in a major conurbation having easy access to a plethora of independent stores (which is pretty much anywhere outside of London these days) it is very possibly the only source of non-X factor style plastic pop. For others; mostly the beard-stroking, glasses wearing Indie boys of this world (of whom I am a card carrying member), HMV is a staid behemoth that represents all that is wrong with music and would quite happily see it collapse.

Of course, as with everything in life, it's not quite a simple as that. Scratch below the surface of music retail and you will find a complex ecosystem where every part relies on every other part and to remove an entity as large as HMV would potentially bring the whole thing to a crashing stop.

Currently, 2% of UK CD sales happen in an independent record shop. I'll repeat that, 2%! Almost nothing, in fact. In contrast, in the run up to Christmas something like 45% of all CDs were sold in an HMV. Even if the Indies stepped up and doubled or trebled their output (which, by the way, they do not have the infrastructure capacity to do) this would not be anything like enough to sustain the music industry as we know it so very quickly you would see the Independent labels, distribution networks and manufacturers that sustain the Indie stores start to disappear as their main source of income is removed.

I know of at least one boss of an Indie label who thanks God for HMV on a monthly basis as that cheque he gets from them sustains the rest of his business. The fact is, independent music retail makes very little money if any at all, why else have something like 70% of Indie stores disappeared over the last 10 years?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Indie record stores. There's nothing quite like the atmosphere they generate, the thrill on stumbling upon your new favourite record by a band you've never heard of and all that but I wouldn't be the music fan that I am today if it wasn't for Virgin, Our Price & HMV and to pretend that Indies would be able to carry on regardless without HMV is naive at best and one eyed, stupid snobbery at worst.

I grew up in Milton Keynes (stop sniggering there at the back). There were no Indie record stores, I had to travel to Northampton or Bedford to find any and even those have probably gone now, and that is a scenario repeated around a vast proportion of this country. The twelve year old me would never have had the nerve to go in to an Indie store anyway. The fact is most kids buy records, if they buy them at all these days, from big stores and without those the next generation will only know the spawn of Cowell thrust at them by TV 'talent' shows.

We have lost so many of our specialist retailers from the high street in the last decade, to lose HMV would make Tesco, Sainsbury and Amazon the only places for the majority of people to buy music and that would be sad indeed.

I'll leave you with a quote from the great sage Bonnie 'Prince' Billy on Pitchfork today that the seems particularly salient right now:
"Making records is commerce, and it's about fooling yourself as a writer and a performer and fooling the audience into not thinking about it and accepting it. It's like when you walk down the street, and you say, "Look at that girl's ass, it's so great." You're ignoring also the fact that she farts and shits out of that ass. It's the same kind of thing."