14 
So there’s good news and bad news. The good news: as suspected, Hilco, the proud new owners of HMV, won’t be shutting the company down. The bad? Well, only half the stores are being saved, which, according to my highly complicated business analysis, means the other half of the stores are going to get shut down.
The strategy is pretty much the same that Hilco used when it took control of HMV Canada in 2011 — shut down the stores, and move the focus to digital sales and technology. In Canada, Hilco shut down the flagship store in Vancouver — the equivalent of the Oxford Street store in London — and made a serious move into digital downloads, creating a 10 million-strong MP3 library for purchase, and rolling out a serious rewards programme for members.
Given that HMV Canada is actually doing pretty well (at least, it’s reporting a profit and isn’t totally mired in debt), it’s very likely that we’ll see a similar strategy taken here in the UK — refocus the business more on digital and merchandise, and less on those actual physical CDs.
Hilco has yet to confirm which stores will be shut down and when (and whether or not we can anticipate a fire sale), so until then, the employees will be living in fear, which kinda sucks. Still, I suppose we should be grateful that the whole company isn’t going belly-up. [This is Money - Yahoo]
HMV Saved By Music and Film Industry
GAME Wants to Buy Up HMV's Stores
Top Boss Out as HMV's Fire Sale Starts With Stores Closing Down
Which is what HMV should have been doing for the last 5 years.
Better late than never
Hope they don’t shut down the HMV on my island (Guernsey)… it’s the only place here that sells music CDs, DVDs and Games any more. I think (or hope) it’s one of the few HMVs that actually gets much business.
You just got colour TV there last week, is that right?
The free market is robust. If you have a need for that business locally then it will happen, it could be you doing that business. Why not offer to buy the local store?
Surely the Channel Islands deserve to have no record shops left for killing all the mainland ones with their tax loophole
We didn’t make the tax loopholes, we simply used them. And as for it killing record shops, the internet did that; now that the tax loopholes are closed, those same companies have just gone elsewhere or even back to the mainland UK and we are several hundred jobs down because of it (which for small islands is a big hit).
Smaller shops with kiosks linked to full library of digital music and movies, with the ability to output to USB or good old fashioned CD/DVD if required. Also a smaller carefully picked selection of stock at competitive prices.
Needs more than that. The majority of customers in HMV are men trying to kill an hour while the Mrs. can’t find those shoes, and those men mostly just browse, they need to convert that into money. So you expand the range of goods music, film, games, books, magazines – all types of media in a digital format. Then as you don’t need a shop floor you turn that into a massive cafe each seat with a 22″ touch screen, so men sit and browse, view and stream media, then anything that they want is added to their account and they pay up. Take the media home on a device, dongle, disc or just download it from home login. And if they don’t pay for media after a cafe stint the content makers get a small percentage of the food and drink profit towards in store media consumptions.
But this sadly makes HMV’s primal business a coffee bar with good media and connections.
And the Problem with that setup, as you break it down like this, it is just how people consume media at home, browsing the content on a screen with a coffee. And it soon dawns on us how pointless HMV is, even if they could supply this great service, it would be no more or no less what I could do in a cafe with a 4G/wifi connection on a table or phone.
So HMV is for people that want music, video and games but don’t have a card to buy online or don’t have a connection, computer or device to buy/view it on – really not the customer base for the foundation of a profitable company dealing in media. It has become a failed premise and can only exist in an online form to make money into the future.