A diary entry on HMV’s genuine comeback to 120 UK stores, vinyl’s eighteen-year sales high, and what it means to watch a format you nearly gave up on for dead become the establishment again
I stopped dead on the high street this week in front of an HMV that genuinely wasn’t there five years ago, in a town where the previous branch had closed with the specific finality I remember assuming, at the time, was simply how this particular story ended for physical music retail everywhere. I want to write honestly about how strange it felt standing there processing a shop that shouldn’t exist by the logic I’d fully internalised roughly a decade ago.
What I Actually Remember Believing About This Format’s Future
I distinctly remember, sometime around 2019, watching HMV go through administration and losing a genuinely significant chunk of its stores, and quietly deciding, along with what felt like most of my generation, that this was simply the format’s slow, inevitable ending playing out in real time, a nostalgic relic finally giving way entirely to streaming the way cassettes had given way to CDs decades before that.
What The Actual Numbers Now Say About How Wrong That Assumption Was
Vinyl sales in the UK are currently sitting at their highest level in eighteen years, more than seven and a half million discs sold last year alone, generating well over two hundred million pounds in revenue, and HMV itself has expanded back out to a hundred and twenty sites nationally, a genuinely significant recovery from the reduced, embattled footprint it operated with after that administration I’d assumed, at the time, was basically a slow-motion funeral.
Walking Into The Actual Shop Itself
Properly busy, on an ordinary weekday afternoon, browsers flipping through crates with the specific unhurried attention I remember from actually being a teenager in shops like this, before I’d fully internalised the assumption that this whole experience was heading toward extinction. A teenager two crates over was showing his considerably older father a specific pressing with genuine, unselfconscious excitement, and I found myself oddly moved watching a format I’d mentally buried get discovered fresh by someone young enough to be my own kid.
The Specific Statistic That Actually Surprised Me Most
Seventy-six percent of Gen Z vinyl buyers purchase records at least monthly, and most of that same demographic actually own a working turntable rather than simply displaying records as decoration, a detail that genuinely undercuts the slightly cynical assumption I’d half-formed that younger buyers were purely collecting vinyl as an aesthetic object rather than an actual listening format.
What This Recovery Actually Means For How I Think About Format Death More Broadly
I think I learned the wrong lesson from watching HMV struggle back in 2019, treating a genuinely difficult period for one specific retailer as confirmation of an entire format’s inevitable, permanent decline, when what was actually happening was considerably messier and more reversible than that tidy narrative allowed for at the time.
The Record Store Day Queue I Actually Joined This Year, Somewhat Reluctantly
I’d sworn off queuing for exclusive pressings years ago, genuinely convinced the whole ritual belonged to an era of physical music retail that had already ended. This April, more out of curiosity than genuine expectation, I joined an actual overnight queue outside my local independent shop, and found myself, somewhat to my own surprise, genuinely enjoying the specific communal ritual of it, strangers sharing flasks of coffee, comparing want lists, all waiting for shops that, by my own outdated assumptions, shouldn’t have still existed to open their doors.
What I Actually Bought That Morning
Nothing especially significant, if I’m honest, one modestly interesting reissue rather than anything from the genuinely hyped headline list, but the actual purchase mattered considerably less than the specific experience of standing in a queue I’d assumed, years ago, belonged entirely to the past.
Where I’ve Actually Landed On My Own Relationship With This Format Now
Properly humbled, honestly, by how confidently wrong I was about an entire industry’s trajectory, and genuinely delighted to have been wrong about it. I’ve started buying records again for the first time in years, not out of nostalgia exactly, but out of something closer to renewed, considerably more informed curiosity about a format that apparently had a great deal more life left in it than my own overconfident predictions ever allowed for.
What I Actually Said To The Teenager And His Father After Watching Them For Longer Than Was Probably Polite
I ended up chatting to them briefly near the till, and the father mentioned, with genuine warmth rather than any performative nostalgia, that he’d assumed he’d have to explain the entire ritual to his son from scratch, only to discover the kid had already built up considerably more actual knowledge of specific pressings and reissue labels than he had himself. That small exchange felt like a genuinely neat encapsulation of everything the sales figures were telling me in the abstract, made suddenly concrete in front of an actual till.
How This Has Actually Changed The Way I Talk About Physical Media With Younger Colleagues
I’ve caught myself, more than once this year, correcting my own default assumption that anyone under thirty views physical formats as purely nostalgic novelty rather than a genuine, actively chosen way of engaging with music. Watching HMV’s actual expansion play out on my own high street has been the single most effective correction to that lazy assumption I could have asked for.