HMV the last bastion of music on the High Street

A discussion on the future of music retailers on the high street.

The Guardian has published its Music Power List 100 to profile the industry’s most powerful influencers.

The century of big hitters includes a couple of names in retail who have differing degrees of success and indeed different approaches to selling music – HMV and Tesco.

Melanie Armstrong, number 26 in the list, is head of music at HMV and has one of the toughest jobs around to stem the tide of falling sales. Share prices of the troubled business have gone from 210p in 2006 to less than 9p at present.

Tesco’s Michael Mulligan is at 41 in the Music Power List 100 and is one of the reasons for HMV’s decline. Thanks to its monopoly on the UK supermarket industry, Tesco is able to add non-core offerings such as CD/DVD/Blu-Ray and accessories at extremely competitive prices. Tesco focuses on artists with chart success which provides little scope for up and coming artists and perhaps this is the area for HMV to champion.

HMV has already tried a number of initiatives to align itself with the lucrative live music scene. In 2009, it signed a deal with MAMA to sponsor 11 venues across the country including Hammersmith Apollo and the Forum in Kentish Town.

HMV’s Get Closer site proved to be an ill-fated foray into the social networking arena thanks largely to the dominance of Facebook. More importantly, according to recent research commissioned by New Media Age from Lightspeed, 42% of respondents cite radio as the most important means of discovering new music. Only 6% used music sites and 4% used social networks.

The chain has always held in-store gigs and signings in major cities but perhaps it’s time to re engage with local talent and provide a shot in the arm for the music industry.

Innovative promotions have also driven traffic to the HMV site. These include a competition to win tickets to a gig by the Wombats at the Borderline in London which was only open to customers who purchased the album via HMV online. The album itself includes acoustic tracks exclusive to HMV.

The recent Record Store Day provided independent music stores with the opportunity to promote young artists by staging live acoustic in-store sessions. I for one, was introduced to Head in Bromley in Kent who stock labels such as Ace, Kent, BGO and PROPER. Hopefully this will foster symbiosis in the local music scene and if those new artists make the big time, they are able to put something back and revisit the site of their first exposure.

Published June 2011