This particular music nerd dutifully filled out his HMV application form in April 1997, and on it wrote that his musical hero was the maverick and frequently unlistenable industrial auteur Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell. Amazingly, the manager of the Southampton store appeared not to view this as a reason to hurl the document into the nearest wastebasket.
Sixteen years later, when HMV first sank into administration in 2013, it seemed unlikely that such an allegiance would still be viewed as an asset. To a great extent, the company – if not its beleaguered, yet still enthusiastic, workforce – had lost its identity: a long period of turbulence had finally seen HMV diversify into selling jeans and speaker docks to the consternation of many and the delight of few.
The casual schadenfreude that followed the announcement of its second bout of administration on Friday was, then, depressingly familiar. However, it belies a crucial change. As a Brexit-blighted Christmas made this near-century-old business one of what’s sure to be several retail casualties, it is nevertheless a markedly leaner and more coherent operation than in its earlier Ozymandian incarnation. In the period since I was made redundant in early 2014, as restructuring firm Hilco took over and the enormous Oxford Street flagship store was replaced by an equally vast Sports Direct, the chain has been downsized. Its focus was shifted back firmly to CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray, the resuscitated realm of vinyl, and specialist markets, particularly in its smaller sister chain, Fopp.
Enthusiastic told-you-sos from the independent music sector were conspicuous by their absence this time around. HMV’s large market share forms an irreplaceable component of the UK’s music industry. If it disappears, the distribution companies who feed releases from record labels to stores will have less business, as will the labels, and indeed the artists themselves.
Chris Reeder co-runs the UK independent label Rocket Recordings, who recently released an album by heavy rockers Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. “We’ve just re-pressed it on CD,” he says. “I asked our distributors Cargo where they’d gone, and they said ‘HMV took them all.’ If HMV goes down we don’t even necessarily know whether we’ll be able to sell those.” He says HMV have been “enormously helpful” in getting behind their other releases, such as World Music by psych-rockers Goat. “If we lost HMV, it’d be another massive chunk out of what is already a very precarious business.” HMV staff have told me anonymously that other indie releases were only pressed on CD in the first place because of demand from HMV.
As streaming increases in popularity, several of the year’s major releases, including Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, have never been released on CD, and the disappearance of HMV could hasten the format’s much-vaunted death. Some have said that independent record shops will benefit from interest being diverted towards them, but without a linchpin such as HMV on the high street, the very concept of ownership of music could be further dissolved, harming the entire sector. With the rise of Netflix and other on-demand film services, the DVD market is also declining at a rate of 30% year on year.
But while it may be tempting to reduce complex problems to simple explanations based on hazy memories and anecdotal evidence, the binary concept of noble indie store and profit-hungry corporate HMV is now as outmoded as the skull and crossbones on an 80s LP inner sleeve that proclaimed home taping was killing music.
Whatever’s one prejudices or received wisdom, in my experience, HMV remains a place staffed and managed by dreamers, exuberant outsiders and insatiable cultural obsessives with a strong grasp on the finer points of the product they’re selling, and whose greatest satisfaction is introducing a total stranger to fresh lunacy. Someone once wryly remarked that if one works in music retail, they also essentially work in a form of social care, as anyone who’s helped lonely misfits and curious introverts of all ages and walks of life find cultural solace will testify.
Given that HMV is the only music store on offer in many British towns, is even the most cynical observer comfortable with the idea of music – this powerful social lubricant and balm for the dispossessed – existing only on stage or in the glow of a screen? Streaming platforms such as Spotify theoretically have infinite choice, but with their curated playlists and recommendations based on prior listening, can compromise serendipitous discovery. The practice of artists selling straight to fans via sites such as Bandcamp similarly doesn’t encourage accidental finds, or provide personal recommendations from a flesh-and-blood staff member.
No one could claim that the outlook is cheerful for HMV, even if it survives into 2019 – it has to battle a generational shift to a view of music as freely accessible, one largely devoid of misty-eyed recollections of a loud, brash Aladdin’s cave of discovery. Selling second-hand records would be difficult given it would undermine HMV’s suppliers, yet they must create a record-shop environment in which one can feel enveloped in culture without being assaulted by commerce, perhaps by means of cafes or bars in-store, the likes of which were actually planned before the company first ran into difficulties.
Ultimately, whether we need HMV depends on more than just how we feel about the prospect of a mercilessly unscrupulous colossus such as Amazon enjoying a monopoly on what’s left of physical music. It doesn’t just depend on whether we’re happy walking half-empty high streets crippled by skyrocketing rents and fixed business rates. It depends in a broader sense on whether we want to see culture moved from our city centres to a dehumanised online space. Whether our heroes are Jim “Foetus” Thirlwell or Little Mix, I’d like to think we don’t.
• Jimmy Martin worked for HMV for nearly 17 years, and now works for London’s Flashback Records. He is a director of the Supernormal festival and a guitarist in Teeth of the Sea and Angel Witch
