HMV - and why they had it coming
Everyone seems to have an opinion on the fact that HMV have gone into administration. Some think it's the decline of the high street, some think it's the rise of the internet. Some blame the economic climate, some blame piracy, some blame consumers. It seems to me that nobody is blaming the actual cause - the collective attitude of the recorded music industry.
Cast your mind back to 2000. US punk band The Offspring were on the verge of releasing "Original Prankster", the first single from their new album, "Conspiracy of One". At the time, decent legal music download services were nonexistant, and the band decided, for whatever reason, to pre-release the new single as a free download from their website the week before its official release on CD. Anyone could go to the band's official site and download a DRM-free digital copy of the song without paying a penny. This would have been much less of a publicity stunt, had HMV not got stroppy and decided not to stock the single. Despite the song being available for free online and the fact that HMV, supposedly the biggest music retailer in the UK, were refusing to sell it, the song went straight to number 6 in the UK chart on its first week of release, and remained in the top 40 for a month. This should really have been a wake-up call to HMV that they're not as tough as they think they are.
But sadly, HMV are just the tip of the iceberg. The bully-boy attitude is rife throughout the industry. It's a fact of life that the world changes, and you need to change with it in order not to get left behind. Music, specifically the consumption of music, is changing faster than most things. The problem is that for the last 10 to 15 years the recording industry has been spending all of its time and money trying - unsuccessfully - to prevent this change, rather than adapting to it. Instead of embracing the internet as a music distribution mechanism, the recording industry sees it as a threat. Rather than look at the success of Napster as proof that people like to download their music, they see it as proof that people don't want to pay for music. Slowly things are getting better, but it is very slowly. The first music download services involved a mammoth monthly fee and if you stoped paying it you lose access to all your music. iTunes (which is basically Napster that you pay for) is phenominally successful, but it's only in the last few years that you could download songs and play them on your car stereo, as early versions were locked to one piece of software and one brand of MP3 player. And let's be honest - Apple had to drag the recording industry kicking and screaming into business with it, again to get them to let them provide DRM-free songs, and again to let them charge what they want for them. As a small aside - the movie industry also need to get a grip on reality, HMV and Blockbuster are in administration so let's have a decent DRM-free movie download service soon before too many people start relying on the Pirate Bay, who provide exactly that. It's a problem that affects every content-producing industry, not just recorded music.
So to summarise, if every HMV store shuts down, nobody will miss them, they'll just be another relic of the past as children in years to come ask their parents "did you really have to go out in the cold and buy a plastic disc every time you wanted to buy music?". When I was a teenager, the only way to get your music heard was to get a recording contract. These days, anyone can release their music online, and nobody buys CDs any more. The recording industry, HMV included, have excluded themselves from this brave new world, and they only have themselves to blame.