Does anyone still shop at HMV?

http://sphotos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/197508_10151440961459273_366020032_n.jpg

twitter is over capacity???

Maybe someone at HMV worked out how to shut it down. Oh good - we can now sue them for breaching the Freedom of Information Act.

"what does this button do?"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BB8hVIuCcAEzOta.gif:large

HMV shut Twitter down?

omg they actually did, lol

If they have done we can take the Beats headphones off their backs.

Right, so they have managed to get 'making 60 employees jobless" into something that might actually impress the BBC News page...

Is Back.

not for me

does twitter go down often?

Thought I'd test it:

Hmm, HMV manages to shut Twitter down! #HmvShutsTwitter

Hmm, my tweet is still in the 'spinning around' mode

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21276913
http://news.sky.com/story/1045744/hmv-staff-use-twitter-to-reveal-redundancies

http://www.itn.co.uk/UK/67509/fired-hmv-staff-take-to-companys-twitter

(blimey, in't ITN News website orribl)

And from Music Week, revealing 190 job losses.

http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/hmv-cfo-ian-kenyon-among-60-new-job-cuts-report/053400

I love the way tabloids and say ITV, use the phrase: "took to Twitter".

Like as if you are sitting in your drawing room drinking a port and you read something in the papers and roar at your manservant to fetch your iPhone at once.

http://isw.changeworknow.co.uk/hmv/stores/vms/fopp

Meanwhile, in 'website not shut' um, thing.

http://www.emoderation.com/hmv-rogue-tweeterrevealed

66 stores to close:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21366009

Yep, Bracknell to go.

Thought so.

Glasgow - Fort, Glasgow - Silverburn, Glasgow Braehead

That only leaves the city centre. I'm surprised at the Braehead one closing as it always looks busy.

Only the outlying London HMVs to go. Fulham Broadway no surprise as that branch has been going downhill practically since it opened. So Oxford Circus, Piccadilly and Selfridge's branches to stay?

Trocadero's gone. Looks like city stores have done badly out of this generally - getting rid of high rents?

Weird that they're keeping both shops in Central Glasgow open (tho' again, the Buchanan St one always seems p busy, esp. at Xmas time) - and no mention of the Fopps, either

Yeah, what's happening with the Fopps?

Every single time I go into Braehead's HMV they're playing Ocean Colour Scene or Reef's "Put Your Hands".

a mercy killing then

Only been in Braehead HMV once (about 4 years ago maybe) and got the then new Racebannon cd. I was impressed they had it. They also had the Torche cd and some other good stuff.

This says Oxford St is a goner: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/06/hmv-sell-oxford-street-store

Went in the Oxford (not Oxford St, xp!) one yesterday and it's probably not a shock to anyone else here but I was still a bit surprised to find music relegated to two sides of one aisle in the small front section. Forgot to look in the classical basement, or notice whether it even still exists.

Bought some blue-crossed books instead - Naked Lunch for cheap, Retromania for cheapish, a Kraftwerk biog which I wasn't sure about since it was still a tenner even after discount, all found nestling among 6000 copies of the Olly Murs biography.

Looks like that one's staying open, too. In case anyone on a high street with all the usual food-stocking suspects (and sadly very few, err, unusual suspects left) thinks "I'd like a Wispa and a carton of Ribena - I'll go to HMV"

They really only have themselves to blame.

Don't need another boring fashion chain there; if HMV goes, there will be no reason to go to Oxford Street whatsoever.

Still heartbreaking to pass that awful "THE STING" fashion place at Piccadilly and think to myself: "But this should be TOWER RECORDS."

Why do HMV persist in trying to flog all this worthless Cowell crap and Wispas and Ribenas instead of concentrating on music, as they should always have done?

Is it really too much to ask record shops to stock vinyl as well as cds and TO STOCK BACK CATALOG.

Quite.

Wow. How much of a carefully worded claim is that it was "Europe's largest music and film store" or whatever? I mean, I'd believe it, but I believed that Dublin's O'Connell Street was Europe's Widest Street until I was 20.

"the largest enclosed park within any European capital city"

Very sad to see the megastore go. Used to go there as a kid in the 80s, when it even stocked back catalogue 7" singles. Just an awesome record shop to behold. Then I worked there for a few years in the late 90s. One of the interview questions was, "If I gave you £50 to spend in here, what would you buy?" One of my choices was a Go Betweens CD and the manager - of the biggest record shop in the world, mark you, in 1996 - followed that up with "Is that the one with Cattle & Cane on it?"

By the 90s, it was a less aspirational looking shop than the Virgin Megastore up the road, more supermarket-like, but if you looked at what was on the shelves, you could tell HMV's staff, and very probably the management too, had better product knowledge than Virgin.

That said, I can't imagine it's possible to pay rent on such a big building these days and still make a profit from selling CDs, DVDs and records, however well you run it.

One of the interview questions was, "If I gave you £50 to spend in here, what would you buy?"

I got a similar question in the pre-interview questionnaire thing I filled out (in the summer of 2000). I think I put down Zen Arcade or something and the manager brought it up at the interview proper! I have a feeling they stopped asking such questions during the '00s.

Heh, by the time I worked in the big store in the early 2000s, there were still a few heads who knew their music (and mainly worked in the 'specialities' section), but a lot more young shavers and nitwit middle management types who knew little, and cared less. I was often told that giving a fuck abt music was actually a hindrance to 'career advancement' at HMV. The store manager also once said to me, with a big grin on his face, that the fact that he couldn't get a food and drink licence for the premises was the only reason that he hadn't already turned the jazz department (where I worked) into a coffee shop.

Good God, you probably sold CDs to me at some point.

Before that I was working in the Jazz dept at Tower, so prob there, too!

Marcello, do you know if Ray's still have a department in Foyles?

tower used to have an 'out there' section in the jazz department that had loads of fushitsusha etc, spent a few quid there in my time. used to be a similar thing in the virgin megastore for a while too...

Yeah, I first saw Double Live 2 in the Virgin Megastore.

Tower's avant section was set up by someone I used to work w/ at Music and Video Exchange - after he left Tower, he went to work as a rep for Harmonia Mundi, a gd guy.

I really do miss the Piccadilly Tower, including the specialist avant section. In the past I could happily spend a whole day there browsing. It was like Amazon but with a shop. The High St Ken Tower branch was no slouch either.

Ray's are most definitely still in Foyle's, up on the third floor.

Good to hear it's not a shame about Ray's

Cosign missing Tower, such a great, sprawling, fun place to browse, especially when they would rejig the floorplan and you'd have to figure out where everything was again.

Tower had a great selection of magazines too. I used to buy the Village Voice there just to browse through the gig listings.

When Tower first opened a Piccadilly it had the most massive selection of 7" singles you've ever seen, too, including many incredible American imports and the like (distinctly remember buying 'I Wanna Testify' by the Parliaments there on my first visit.)

While I was there, the jazz and classical sections were managed by the son of a p well known English jazz trumpeter and radio personality - so the shelves were always well stocked with his Dad's CDs...

Can't remember if it was Tower or HMV, but one of them had this classical department that was slap bang in the middle of the shop floor (in the basement IIRC) but shut off from the rest of the store with glass walls. The soundproofing was magnificent, you walked in and suddenly the hubbub of the whole place was cut out completely and replaced with this atmosphere of rarefied calm. Not that I ever bought anything from there, mind.