HMV — Britain’s record shop died twice and was bought back smaller

HMV was Britain’s iconic music-and-film chain, and on 5 February 2019 it was sold out of administration to a Canadian record-shop owner for £883,000 — a price that would barely buy a flat in the postcode of its old Oxford Street flagship. Founded in 1921 as the retail arm of The Gramophone Company, trading under the “His Master’s Voice” name and the painting of Nipper the terrier listening into a gramophone horn, HMV spent most of a century as a fixture of the British high street: the place a generation bought its first single, its first album, its first DVD. At its 2000s peak it ran more than 200 UK stores and was the country’s dominant specialist music retailer. Then recorded music went to downloads and then to streaming, film went the same way a few years later, and the chain that sold physical entertainment found itself selling a category the market was abandoning.

The decisive verdict is properly read as an acquisition in much-reduced form, because HMV did not so much die as collapse, get propped up, and collapse again before being bought small. It entered administration in January 2013, was rescued by the restructuring firm Hilco in April 2013, traded on for nearly six years under new owners — and then, in December 2018, went into administration a second time. The afterlife was not liquidation but a buyer: Doug Putman, owner of Canada’s Sunrise Records, who acquired roughly 100 of the 125 remaining stores and close to 1,500 jobs, and kept the brand and the dog alive.

What was lost in the rescue was scale and history. Twenty-seven stores that Putman did not want closed immediately, costing 455 jobs — and among them was 363 Oxford Street, the world-famous flagship that had carried the brand on and off since 1921. The chain that emerged was real, still trading under the HMV name, and smaller and humbler than the one that had once defined how Britain bought music.

The mechanism was the same one that emptied record shops worldwide — the iPod, the download, the £9.99-a-month all-you-can-hear subscription — applied to a retailer with high-street rents, business rates, and a product whose unit sales fell every year. HMV’s distinction is not that it avoided the fate of Tower or Virgin, but that, unlike them, it found someone willing to keep the name on the door.

Camelot Music — The Mall’s Music People, Bought at the Peak

Camelot Music was the great mall music chain of the American Midwest, and it ceased to exist as an independent company on April 22, 1999, when it was folded into the Trans World Entertainment roll-up that would become FYE. Founded in 1956 by Paul David in Massillon, Ohio — as a humble rack-jobbing operation called Stark Record and Tape Service, stocking 45s and LPs in drugstores and grocers — it grew over four decades into one of the country’s largest record retailers, with roughly 360 stores at its early-1990s peak, a fixture of the enclosed shopping mall whose tagline cast its clerks as “the music people.” It did not so much die as get absorbed, at the very moment the compact-disc business was cresting and about to turn.

The mechanism here was not a single technological guillotine but a slower vise: consolidation. As CD margins thinned and big-box discounters like Best Buy used cheap music as a loss leader to pull shoppers toward television sets, the mall music chains were squeezed from both ends — by retailers who undercut them and, soon after, by a digital format that would make the disc itself optional. Camelot’s response, like much of the industry’s, was to get bigger, buying The Wall and Spec’s Music in 1998 to become the nation’s largest mall-based music retailer, and then merging that combination into Trans World.

The irony, and the warning, sits in the timing. Camelot had already passed through bankruptcy once — a 1996 Chapter 11 driven not by the internet but by a leveraged buyout. The Bahrain-based fund Investcorp had bought the chain from its founder in 1993, and roughly $300 million of the $476 million in debt that drove Camelot into court was the cost of that buyout. The company emerged in January 1998, leaner, then promptly spent its renewed strength on acquisitions, and within a year had merged itself out of existence into a larger entity facing the same digital reckoning.

Fate, here, is Acquired: Camelot was not liquidated in a fire sale but absorbed and rebranded, its stores eventually carrying the FYE banner. The “music people” of Massillon kept their lights on under someone else’s name — until that name, too, retreated before downloading and streaming over the decade that followed.