Richard Morrison

The sad but inevitable demise of HMV

As I write this, 2,000 employees of HMV wait to learn their fate. For the second time in six years, this once-proud chain of record stores has gone into administration, following a poor Christmas generally on the high street and a particularly catastrophic one for a retailer offering products that fewer and fewer people want to buy.

When HMV first went into administration, in 2013, the cause was said to be the vast increase in online downloads at the expense of ‘physical’ albums. Then came a ray of hope. In 2015, with its flagship London store on Oxford Street reopened, HMV actually overtook Amazon as the UK’S biggest retailer of CDS and DVDS.

It was a false dawn. Now, downloads have declined in popularity, but instead the demand for streaming services such as Spotify has soared, and the impact on CDS has been just as disastrous.

With two thirds of all recorded music now consumed via streaming (a jawdropping 91 billion tracks in 2018), CD sales have fallen from 42 million to 32 million in a year.

Of course, 32 million is not a negligible number. HMV could yet stagger on long enough to celebrate the centenary of its first store opening in 1921. But one thing has definitely gone, and that is its reputation as a repository of expertise about classical music. James Daunt, the brilliant retailer who has turned around the fortunes of Waterstones bookshops, was spot on when he declared that one reason for HMV’S decline is its concentration on the interests of one demographic – teenagers and young adults – whereas his policy at Waterstones has been to target people of all ages and literary tastes. I doubt, however, whether Daunt’s wise words will be heeded at HMV.

That will be a huge shame, because for any classical music fan growing up between, say, 1950 and 1990, walking into HMV was like opening a music encyclopaedia – except that this one could not only talk but also advise on vintage recordings and performers, obscure foreign labels and corners of the repertoire you hadn’t dreamed of exploring for yourself. Of course, old-school music librarians and music teachers did that too. But they are also now endangered species. And although the huge rise in streaming theoretically makes it easier for newcomers to sample bits of symphonies or operas without committing to buying a whole album, it also means they don’t get access to another invaluable source of knowledge for those eager to learn about music – the album sleeve note.

One by one, then, the conduits of musical knowledge for youngsters and newcomers are fast disappearing. I find this even more alarming than the decline of the CD. Orchestras will survive that. If you look back at the 130-year history of recorded music, you find musicians constantly adapting to technological changes that initially alarmed them. The difference between then and now, however, is the huge decline in the number of people with even the scantiest knowledge of classical music. Just watch University Challenge on TV. Brilliant young students who have no trouble answering the most searching questions about science, films or literature cannot recognise a Beethoven symphony, let alone tell you what century it was written in.

This isn’t another plea for the restoration of proper music education in state schools. I’ve issued enough of them. Rather it’s a lament for the demise of all the ‘informal’ ways by which people became hooked on classical music, often unexpectedly, and not always early in life. I remember once being summoned to the Bank of England – not to advise on interest rates, but because the thengovernor, Mervyn King, had picked up a music magazine (maybe even this one) when he had a few minutes to spare at a station newsagent, played the CD stuck to the cover when he got home (the first classical CD he had ever played) and subsequently become so engrossed by this new world that he wanted to set up a scheme to get rich bankers to sponsor orchestral premieres. (I think he did, too.)

That sort of chance ‘conversion’ won’t happen when nobody sells CDS in shops any more, or stocks them in public libraries, or employs staff that can tell their Arne from their Elgar. I hope HMV survives. But only if it brings back those wonderfully nerdy assistants who would tell you why you should buy Kleiber’s Beethoven Five rather than Karajan’s, or Schütz if you liked Monteverdi. Without the likes of them, I certainly wouldn’t have had a life in music.

For any classical music fan, walking into HMV was like opening a music encyclopaedia