Ok, so that's a big bold statement. But anyone who has engaged me in a discussion about dwindling music sales will have heard me argue this one : That I believe that HMV and Virgin, once record stores, lured record buyers in from the independents and turned them onto other products such as DVDs and console games, and in so doing, began the decline in music retail in the UK.
Of course, digital music will be the ultimate player in the whittling down of the high street, and there's nothing the megastores could have done, or should have done, about that. But it was interesting at The Great Escape festival last month when an HMV employee continually referred to music as being at the 'core' of HMV. That's laughable. What will HMV be selling in five year's time? There'll be no DVDs and no CDs. They've inadvertently cut themselves out of the future of music retail.
I'm blogging about this because Charles Arthur wrote this piece in last week's Guardian, which, in a roundabout way, backs up my HMV/Virgin argument, as well as rightly criticising the major players in the music industry for their continuously hilarious cries that file-sharing is killing music.
Comments