The last few years have been tough for music retailer HMV, but now it looks as though things are slowly turning around. Just one year after entering administration, HMV have reclaimed their position as Britain’s most successful retailer of physical music. According to reports in The Telegraph, HMV’s vinyl sales have increased 170% year on year in 2014. After the store started to sell vinyl, it was thought that this would be the move that would save the company with the ever growing interest in ‘retro’ and a vast increase of record player sales elsewhere – last Christmas certainly proved this.
As well as vinyl sales, HMV also accounted for 1 in 3 DVD and CDs being sold in the UK in the fortnight leading up to Christmas. Financial losses during the Christmas period of 2012, £176.1 million worth of debt and the chief executive resigning caused HMV to go into severe meltdown and administration in 2013. 223 stores and more than 4,000 jobs were put at risk. However, 144 store were bought by restructuring company Hilco three months later.
Paul McGowan, chief executive of Hilco, said: “HMV has captured more and more market share in a year when major new movie releases have been scarce and there have been only a few major album successes. With a bumper year of new releases already planned for 2015 we expect to have overall growth in like-for-like DVD and Blu-ray sales as well as continued growth in the physical music sector with vinyl also expected to continue its revival”. McGowan has previously said that the key to HMV’s success is to hold events that online competitors, like Amazon, are unable to. With HMV finally starting to reclaim its top spot, the future looks bright and could eventually mean that some stores are reopened.
Source: The Telegraph
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