It's gutting for the staff obviously but in general I'd say good riddance. I went in our local Zavvi (which by the way is a completeley absurd name for a record shop) and they didn't appear to sell any CDs. It was just DVD boxsets, mobile phone accessories and games.

But perhaps I might sideline this thread one moment for a reminiscence on...

Defunct record store chains we have loved and lost

I'll start with Our Price. That's where I bought all my music in the mid 90s and it tended to be staffed by people with an actual interest in music. No gimmicks, listening stations, display units, etc, just racks and racks of tapes and CDs to waste your Saturdays flicking idly through.

… I seem to remember, but in its latter years Our Price suffered from a very mainstream-orientated stock.
Anyone remember Harlequin Records?
To be honest, though, it's hard to feel much affection for any of the chain record stores, existing or defunct. Unlike, say, Bonaparte's in Croydon. Now THAT was what a record shop should be.

...seems like something that happened so long ago now. Used to do this at Our Price in Belfast because I couldn't afford CDs.

On this isle we had a chain called Golden Discs. Fairly limited stock but they put new releases for sale the Saturday beforehand in stores in the north as well as the south.

The Gramophone Shop was another chain I think based in NI only. They had a Belfast branch and other shops within some provincial shopping centres.

Did they have large shops, or were they all small little places?

...had there stores bought by Virgin, non? I seem to think that most current (recent?) Zavvi stores stand on the fossilised bones of Our Price stores from the 90's. This is certainly the case in the smallish high street store in Chelmsford and several others in any case.

"An East Anglian Institution" was their catchphrase. Hardly world shaking, but spent plenty of money there in my youth...

Seriously, though I've no love for Zavvi and nothing but sympathy for their employees, this isn't good news for consumers, as it's now HMV or nothing on the High Street (even the last few Fopps are owned by HMV)

All of the issues with zavvi existed when it was Virgin. It was expensive and stock was poor. Not sure if zavvi is a worse name than Virgin even. The management buyout was just a way to get the Virgin brand out of a difficult market - clever bit of strategy (savvy even).

surely?

The arrival of an MVC in Southend resulted in a Mexican standoff at the top of the high street, as it went head-to-head with branches of Virgin and HMV. All three shops were within a couple of minutes walking distance of each other and there was strong competition.

MVC may have been a chainstore but it was run a little differently from its more established rivals. The staff seemed to be under no pressure to promote the latest releases. Instead they played whatever they liked. In doing so they tapped into one of the underestimated pleasures of music buying – that of walking into a record shop and hearing an album that could have come out at any point during the last 50 years, played in its entirety. Ironically the only time I experience this now is when I visit Shepherds Bookbinders in Holborn.

Every now and then while flipping through the racks, I would encounter something completely bizarre and unexpected; an Acid Mothers Temple import, for example – the kind of thing usually only found in the London Oxford Street branch of HMV with an absurdly inflated price tag on it. Unexpected discoveries are another staple of the quality record shopping experience. I would like to extend my gratitude to whoever or whatever was responsible for this and the various other oddities that I would occasionally come across, lurking incongruously among the Britney Spears and Oasis CDs. There was a glorious irrationality to it.

MVC changed hands a number of times during its short life and finally closed its doors in 2006. The recently defunct Zavvi and, last man standing, HMV may have been better run businesses, but as record shops their provisional branches are musical dead-zones that seem to quash any passion their staff might have for what they are selling.

MVC had an independent streak, or at least the branch in Southend did. It’s been gone a while now and I miss it.

The biggest record shop in New York, the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, is to close in April.

The 75,000 sq ft store, which opened in 1996, is one of six currently operating under the Virgin name in the US.

However, its fate has been uncertain since Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson sold his North American entertainment arm in August 2007.

However, the Virgin Times Square store makes an annual profit of $6m on sales of $55m, according to sources quoted by Billboard, making it the highest-volume music store in the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7828483.stm

Admittedly, my last couple of trips to ransack Zavvi have been trying, a handful of bored, demotivated staff and Katy Perry played on a loop. Despite this, I still love record shops.
I love browsing, wasting time, looking for bargains, finding stuff that I'd read about ages ago and thought, I must get that, and then finding it much later, remaindered.
We're about to lose a huge piece of our social fabric. It won't come back, what with the digital age and all that.
Soon, the chance of getting chinned by a Mod for getting the last copy of Gary Gilmours Eyes in a picture sleeve, will be gone forever. A world where your grand kids sit at your feet and say ' What was it like buying records grandad?'
Shame.

...what would you rather have - a record store that you approved of or one that stayed in business? It seems that people are very approving of old stores that went bust and very scathing about new stores that are going bust as well.

...closed in 2007. I remember browsing the aisles during its closing down sale. The place was deserted even when there was plenty of good stock going cheap.

Callers was, I believe, a small north-eastern company that in the '70's and '80's ran a small chain of shops that sold carpets, some white goods and records. There was a big one on Northumberland Street in Newcastle and a smaller one in the village further north I used to live in.

Carpet showroom on the ground floor. Record and Tapes upstairs on the second. Never struck me as at all odd then. But bloody well does now.

but I don't know which ones

18 stores, 353 employees. That makes an average of 20 or so in each shop. Assuming they weren't all genuine Oxford Streetesque megastores, surely five or six to replenish the racks, two in the stock room, a couple of floorwalkers and three or four on the tills would have sufficed.

So what did the other half of the workforce do?

I recall when this thread ran before, late Dec 08 (carp, carp),that a comment was made about how responsibly HMV would run their near monopoly. Heppo surmised that the interweb online competition would prevent them from making hay with their prices.
Hmmmmm.
Needing some retail therapy I popped in yesterday. Apart from the pitifully small area devoted to what is just now called "specialist", in the small 1/4 of the shop devoted to CDs, there seemed way more titles at £16 than I recall previously, suggesting a surreptitious hike has taken place.

I went to see what was going cheap, they were already clearing the shelves of stock. The lass who served me was genuinely upset about losing the job she loved doing. Really sad, even though it wasn't a brilliant store any more, 300 more people out of work is not good.

and the first thing they have done is take down the 20% off sale sign and whack all the remaining stock back up to full price.

I won't be going back in.

.. but is the Britannia Music Club still going? - I think that was it's name - haven't seen a leaflet for any of those things - books, music etc in a dog's age.

As a teen being brought to London, Tower on Picadilly Circus was an awesome place. Every record you could think of was there and amazingly it stayed open till midnight. Midnight! It seemed like the perfect music store.

I was lucky enough as a kid to be brought on some cool holidays and to have parents indulge me on a visit to the local Tower, so I got to visit Sunset Strip and NYC stores. In the nineties as a college student in Dublin, we got our own Tower Records on Wicklow Street, which to my mind was the coolest thing to happen in those pre-Celtic Tiger days. It went on fire, they had a very, very nice fire sale of barely damaged goods, then it re-opened, and it continues to trade to this day. Is it the only Tower left?

When I'm back in Dublin, I still have a root aroud, it's got a good vibe and you can read the magazines for ages...

http://www.towerrecords.ie/

... what about the beautiful indie stores? Dublin's best record shop, the delightful Road Records, has just announced it is to close. Very sad news indeed, and likely to have a massive impact on the Irish music scene.

No doubt Tower Records is next. IT is the only Tower left, the rest of them closed years ago. And whilst the vibe in there is good, they charge so much more for records than anyone else in Ireland that people will just turn their backs on them. I know I have.

http://www.thumped.com/news/music-news/sad-news-from-road-records.html

Record shops only have themselves to blame. Each one has the same stock - whatever x-factor has churned out that week. At least on line you can easily find what you're looking for (impossible in a record shop if the music is more than six months old)and you don't have to deal with the sulky moody staff, the majority of whom don't appear to realise that they are there to serve the customers. Good riddance to Zavvi and roll on the end of HMV.

On line browsing is well nigh impossible, the art of not knowing whatt you may need, want, covet or desire, until prompted by physical appearance and presence. Getting harder and harder to do, as the outlets reduce. When there is nowt but supermarkets and charity shops to flutter thru' the racks of, imagine what unsuitable nonsense will be purchased. Sometimes the itch just has to be scratched, sometimes there just has to be a musical purchase, just to bring order back to the chaos (or the other way round): we are at risk of being denied this civil liberty!

You can't halt progress, but good riddance??????????? Sheesh!

is a memory jogger of how many chains have actually gone down the tubes.

I'd forgot about MVC and Andy's Records, I liked Andy's, the staff cared.

Furthermore, with the barrage of closures over the past couple of years, getting stock out of the Record Companies (sic) is nigh on impossible without paying at least something up front.

So the future of music, if ever there was any doubt, is not on the High Street.

The judge of if a Retail Business is a potential goer, is summed up by "Would You Open It Now".

Who would open a Music Retail Business now? Maybe an indie or someone who could rely on good second hand stock turning over.
If you did want new back catalogue or more obscure stuff, it's distributed by majors who won't supply you.

The real nail in the coffin for Music Retail was EUK going down, they'd become the middle men who took all the risk.