Soon you may have to hold a séance to raise the ghost of the
British Recorded Music Industry. Once so proud and like Britannia ruling over
the waves it now seems that we’ve very much run aground, we’ve hit the rocks
and on the shoreline or promenade we can find no shops.
There was always due to be a knock-on effect from the collapse
of HMV, an aftershock if you like. As yet we do not know the full extent of it
but as the well-respected Martin Elbourne
points out here,
it will not be pretty.
As he suggests many small distributors could lose out on
outstanding invoices, never to be paid. Major labels too had taken a risk in
order to prop up the ailing retailer. Some will survive but there are dark days
ahead.
It’s easy to criticize HMV for not moving with the times,
failing to embrace the digital age or whatever, but you probably have to
remember that they were starting on the ‘back foot’. They already had huge
investments in bricks and mortar, in being the showroom for the record
industry. As they were so reliant upon the latter they also adopted the same
initial stance on downloads as the major labels and thus were too late to the
party anyway.
Perhaps iTunes is the only store in town, having the
hardware in so many people’s hands has certainly played to their strengths and
they’ve used that strength to manipulate the labels into their modus operandi –
as flawed as it often is. Similarly Amazon has proved the scourge of bookshops
and electronic retailers as well as being the cheapest supplier of CDs.
ITunes and Amazon are the behemoths; having established
themselves early and decisively they seem to be the automatic choice for all
consumers. To a large extent they’re also now in a monopoly position which
cannot be good news – for anyone.
The HMV brand may well return in a substantially reduced
capacity, the industry certainly needs it; there’s still a question mark over
the consumers though.
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