HMV: The failure of HMV is both sad and inevitable What would you miss about browsing in a record store? The long rows of albums, stacked in their hundred and maybe thousands, racks and racks of colourful sleeves, arranged alphabetically and by genre, fingers moving through the stack in search of some sought after gem at the right price, or just a moment of inspiration or nostalgia as you contemplate a personal favourite, before slipping it back in with a sigh, and moving on. A good record store is like a holy space for a music fan, where you can luxuriate in longing and nostalgia, filled with the warm sense of being somewhere your musical obsession is treated as venerable and even sacred. Where all that music buzzing around your head and in your heart is displayed as an actual, physical reality, something you can touch as well as listen to. Well those days are going ... going ... almost gone. The failure of HMV, the last of the superstore music chains, is both sad and inevitable. It is sad because it signifies the beginning of the end of an era, although it was never really possible to form an emotional attachment to HMV, too bright, too slick, too impersonal, an American-style one-stop entertainment shop. It was inevitable because the way we consume music has been utterly transformed by the internet and a high store retail space no longer fills the interactive desires of a digital generation. It may be hard to understand how a business with 38 per cent of the market can fail, and questions have to be asked about its inability to adapt to the new models of the music business, yet we also have to acknowledge that those days of physical music are coming to an end. Anyone whose heart mourns the loss of a record store is suffering from the bittersweet tang of nostalgia. We are mourning the loss of our own youth while a new generation forge their own rituals in the endless racks of cyberspace. The last time I was in a HMV store was just before Christmas as I bustled along the high street at Wood Green. But then I can't actually physically walk past a record store without being lured in just to contemplate those racks of music, my inner world made tangible. I didn't actually buy anything. Truth be told, I rarely do. The modern browser treats the internet as one giant record store. You can pursue musical fads and fancies laterally, listen to artists and tracks that catch your fancy, watch videos, read background. It may not have the same physical quality but it is, in some senses, even more tangible. When I read a music biography now, I click on every piece of music referenced as I go, so I can actually hear what is being written about, and it is all there somewhere, legally or illegally, on YouTube and Spotify and music blogs, every piece of recorded music ever made. The problem for music retailers is that there is neither need nor obligation to buy in the end. The end of HMV is not good news for music lovers. It may well suit some independent stores to pick up the slack, the kind of places we really love, where the staff are as enthusiastic about music as the consumer, but there isn't an indie store in every shopping mall and high street, and the commercial struggle remains the same, to sell consumers a product they can pick up cheap or free at the click of a mouse. When the News of the World was closed, some of its readers moved elsewhere, but many just stopped buying newspapers. If the same happens to HMV's customer base, the knock on effect of the loss of 38 per cent of current music sales is potentially awful for every element of the music business, from artist development to catalogue sales. You are not going to find start up bands or obscure old gems on the shelves of Morrisons or Tesco. There will be huge ripples and repercussions if HMV should disappear. And yet music, as ever, will still be heard ringing out in our lives, even as our retail habits and rituals change. Maybe one day, our children will be mourning their lateral trips through Napster's pirate archives. Aye, when I were a lad, bands used to have their own MySpace site, you know ...