While spending the new year with my parents in my old home town on Slough, I wandered up to Town Centre, to discover that town’s principle (and indeed, only) record shop, a branch of the HMV chain, has gone.
Chimpomatic.com notes it’s sad demise
I live in the 52nd most populated settlement in the UK – the much maligned Berkshire town of Slough – a community with a population of around 126,000 people, roughly 50% ‘Caucasian’ and 50% ‘Asian / Other’. When I moved here 15 years ago, Slough was able to support at least 6 record shops including an outlet for each of the major chains – HMV, Virgin, Our Price – plus several indie shops including the magnificent Slough Record Centre on the Farnham Road. Last month the HMV store in the main shopping centre shut up shop and removed the racks – a shabby printed note on the shutters proclaiming that Slough residents need not worry, they could take the train to Windsor to buy records from the HMV there. Slough residents will need to take the train because the HMV was the last record shop left in town (with the exception of one remaining Asian music record shop).
We keep reading about the death of the high street record shop, but you don’t take such claims seriously until you see it happen in the place where you’ve grown up. I suppose this is the down side of buying more and more music directly from the bands. So, is losing the high street record shop an acceptable price for smaller bands being economically viable?
Direct purchasing from bands is probably having an impact, but only because the internet allows easy access to band shops. The internet is at the root of most of the other causes of the decline of record shops too – the growth of downloading (legal and illegal), the ease of comparing prices so individuals can hunt for bargains, the reduced costs of offering internet-only shops such as Amazon (which chases the price of products down) etc.
Borders has just closed in Bournemouth, a great loss in my opinion. But, like many others, I’d use it for browsing the books and then buy more cheaply online.
Tell you what, you ought to come to Brighton. There are record shops (and I mean RECORD shops not CD shops) here that have proper racks of 12″ records taking up most of the floor. One of them has all the CDs, books and videos upstairs and all the vinyl taking up the whole basement floor. It may not be on the high street but it’s certainly enough like the old school record shops you used to get for my liking.
I firmly believe that the likes of HMV are instrumental in their own demise. Over the past few weeks, I have bought (or had bought for me) CDs by Parade, Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, Mermaid’s Kiss, Galahad and Nick Harper. While I didn’t check whether any of these were available in either of York’s two HMV stores first, past experience tells me that they won’t have been. OK, I may have been able to order some of them from the HMV website but that doesn’t really help the shops, does it?
HMV shops stock current chart music, films and games – if you want anything else you have to go elsewhere.
Personally, the only time I shop in the likes of HMV are when they have items in the 2 for £10 sales that I want. General on-line shopping (at, for example, play.com) is cheaper and, in general, I would rather my money went as directly as possible to the bands in question. Hence, for much of my purchases from the “smaller” bands, I prefer to buy via their own websites or at gigs.
It is a sad fact that on-line retailing of items such as CDs, books, and games is, eventually, going to kill the high street outlets for these items. The only person I know who still does the majority of her music shopping at HMV is my mum (and that’s only to buy CDs as presents…)