His Masters Voice goes Silent
The threatened closure of HMV (which has gone into administration) saddens me mainly because thousands of staff in its shops in Britain and Ireland face joining the dole queue, along with workers from Blockbuster video and Jessops cameras which are also in Administration. Good to see that workers at two HMV branches in Limerick have occupied the shops demanding they are paid for work they've already done and that they get redundancy payments. Unless somebody buys the shops and reopens them, that will be the end of music shops in most UK town centres. I believe that would also hasten the end of the CD format - why make products if there are no shops to sell them? (apart from a small number of specialist shops on the one hand and supermarkets selling a narrow range on the other). Of course people can order CDs online, but increasingly they are more likely to just download or stream the music. In the pre-internet age record shops were portals to whole musical worlds, and beyond them...