Rock & roll SUICIDE; As HMV closes stores, is their demise an inevitable result of the download age, or did the record giants sow the seeds of their own destruction?(Features)

Byline: Jonathan Brocklebank

FOR Annie Lennox it was Procul Harem's A Whiter Shade of Pale. For Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr, it was David Bowie's The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Sharleen Spiteri from Texas still remembers the day she bought Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello, while Amy MacDonald says the first record she ever bought was the Travis album The Man Who.

By the time the next generation arrives, however, the question of that all-important first record purchase will be redundant - for record shops will be virtually extinct.

That intoxicating experience of taking a new record home, unwrapping it, poring over the artwork and devouring the sleeve notes as the first few bars ring out is no longer an essential one for Scotland's teenagers who pipe their music collection into their homes via broadband. Why would they care which was the first mp3 file to arrive in a digital folder on their computer screen?

And many much older music fans are now following suit. So it came as no surprise when HMV, the last High Street giant in the recorded music market, recently announced plans to close 60 of its stores throughout the UK following disappointing sales over Christmas and a 24 per cent drop in its share price.

In the past two decades, HMV has seen off town-centre competition, from Virgin and its successor Zavvi to Our Price and Tower Records. Borders and Woolworths, too, have fallen by the wayside - and even the last man standing is now struggling to compete in a marketplace that has been turned on its head by new technology.

The scale of the change was illustrated on Thursday, when it emerged that the online retailer Amazon is to create 950 full-time jobs in Dunfermline and Gourock. Music is one of its core markets. Amazon almost invariably undercuts the record shops and gives consumers the choice of downloading albums or having a CD delivered straight to their door.

Then there is iTunes, the world's biggest online music retailer, which sold its 10billionth song last year. Meanwhile, dozens of other websites allow unscrupulous fans to download a fortune's worth of recorded music for free in a matter of hours.

When online technology first became available more than a decade ago, the High Street giants diversified for all they were worth, particularly into the DVD market. But iTunes and Amazon are now there, too - along with a proliferation of illegal sites where internet users can accumulate free movies as readily as they can free music.

Now HMV, holed up in vastly expensive city-centre and shopping-mall retail units, looks increasingly like a shop out of time, a throwback to an age when teenagers had to leave their bedrooms to buy music and when it came in the form of a disc rather than a computer file.

BUT few of us with any real nostalgia for the record shops of our youth will extend much sympathy to HMV in its time of trouble. For the company, which also owns the book store chain Waterstone's and the record retailer Fopp, can itself shoulder some of the blame for the disappearance of dozens of record shops from Scotland's towns and cities.

It was, after all, the arrival of the record megastores such as HMV and Richard Branson's Virgin in the 1980s which drove many of the independent retailers out of business.

Bruce Findlay, former manager of Simple Minds and once Scotland's best known record shop owner, says his own chain and many others like it were crushed by Virgin and HMV's supermarket approach to selling records.

Their stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap ethos devalued the whole experience of buying music, he argues, with the result that music lovers forgot they ever cared about record shops.

They certainly cared in 1967, when Mr Findlay first opened Bruce's Records in Falkirk. It was the year the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper and a teenage Annie Lennox was moved to purchase A Whiter Shade Of Pale. Record shops stood at the cutting edge of every town's fashion scene.

'People would use them as a kind of club,' remembers Mr Findlay. 'They would come in and chat to staff and swap ideas and recommendations. Real record shops would have someone really knowledgeable about music, almost nerdy, behind the counter - people who actually knew something about the product.'

Throughout the late 60s and 70s, Bruce's Records expanded across the Central Belt and into Perth and Dundee. The stores would pride themselves on the exhaustive nature of their stock, not just covering the biggest-selling stars but also niche artists.

'They didn't make me much money,' says Mr Findlay. 'I made my money out of the biggest bands of the day like the Beatles and Abba, just like everyone else did. But I made my name and my reputation out of Frank Zappa, the Incredible String Band, The Grateful Dead.'

Back in the 1970s, only department stores such as John Menzies, Boots and Woolworths provided any real competition for the independent record shop - and, even then, only for mainstream artist sales. But by the 1980s, with the arrival of multi-storey megastores with acres of retail space to devote to extensive stock, the independents were squeezed out.

THEY effectively did for me what Sainsbury's and Safeway did for the corner shop,' says Mr Findlay. 'I was among the last of the old-fashioned record shops which used to exist in every town along with the butcher, the baker and the fishmonger.

'I feel the utmost sympathy for the HMV staff, particularly the knowledgeable ones but, as a business, I don't feel sorry for them at all. I think they are the cause of the demise of the record industry.

'The irony is music is probably bigger than it has ever been. The insatiable appetite for music remains. People will pay upwards of [pounds sterling]100 to see some of the top bands in concert.'

But fewer and fewer punters are prepared to pay cash for recorded music when they can hear it any time they like on websites such as YouTube or Spotify or, if their conscience does not get the better of them, download it for free.

Sandy McLean, who owns one of Glasgow's last independent stores, Avalanche, said sales of singles had dropped by about 90 per cent in recent years: 'Downloads have totally decimated sales in the single market.

'I think people in general really do like record shops but they just need reminded that these smaller and independent shops are here. If we were to disappear completely, then people would realise what a loss it is.'

Yet few would have predicted the massive impact of the record store on popular culture when HMV first opened its doors in London's Oxford Street back in 1921. At the time, it stocked only 200 popular recordings, mainly music hall and classical works performed by artists signed to the Gramophone Company, which later became EMI.

Customers would make appointments and, upon arrival, would be greeted by a white-gloved commissionaire.

Thereafter they would conducted to the 'viewing salons' where they would sit and listen to the new releases and peruse the latest gramophone models.

In Scotland, meanwhile, tiny record departments started springing up in electrical stores. Then, in the early 1950s, when Sinatra and Crosby were filling the airwaves, the first dedicated record shops began to appear. With the birth of rock 'n' roll a few years later, they proliferated, reaching a peak in the 1970s.

Typically, every inch of wall space was plastered in posters and album covers. Record shops were cavernous yet cramped environments, almost invariably staffed by long-hairs in illby fitting T-shirts denoting the name of their favourite band of the moment. Like the characters in the Nick Hornby novel High Fidelity, many of those behind the counter were incorrigible music snobs, sneering at their customers' mainstream purchases. But at least it showed they cared.

In stark contrast to this came the sterile, wide-open spaces of the 'megastores' which replaced these traditional outlets. In going 'corporate', record stores lost their personality and, independents would argue, their soul.

Now, more than 30 years on, the megastores are in serious danger of losing their place on the High Street, too. But the independents have not quite given up the ghost.

'Sometimes I think I should just pack this in,' admits Raymond Bird, who owns One-Up, Aberdeen's longest-established independent music store, which opened in 1979.

'On the other hand, we would like to hang on. After all, we have seen off the likes of Virgin and Zavvi. We are surviving, we are just hanging on. It is up to us to keep it going and make sure we are bringing in new music that customers want to hear.'

Chris Pleasance, owner of Allander Record Fairs, which circulates in the Highlands and Central Scotland, said technological changes were at the root of the problem for shops with a town-centre presence and overheads to pay: 'The decline of the music industry is directly related to downloading. HMV is like most large companies and didn't adapt and change that quickly.'

Specialising in artists from the 1960s and 1970s, Mr Pleasance now tours the towns which no longer have a dedicated music store. Some of his customers have no interest in CDs, far less downloads, and prefer to seek out material in its original vinyl format.

HE says: 'The sort of people we deal with are an older group or more serious,' he says. 'People often walk past the CD at [pounds sterling]5 to buy the record for [pounds sterling]20.'

As for casual record buyers who have not yet converted to downloads, they are as likely to buy new releases in Tesco or Sainsbury's as they are to make a special trip to a record shop. Neither of the retail giants stocked CDs until 2003 - but, just seven years later, supermarkets had captured a quarter of the shrinking market.

Although HMV has not confirmed where the closures will occur, Scotland is certain to be hit. There are six branches in Glasgow alone, a further three in Edinburgh and 14 others dotted around the country.

Chief executive Simon Fox admits: 'The pace of change in the markets in which we operate underlines the urgency with which we must continue to transform this business.'

Yet many will wonder where there is left to turn for a store specialising in entertainment media. Almost all of HMV's stock, from the Sopranos box sets, to Robbie Williams's back catalogue, to computer games, is readily downloadable or, at the very least, available at a more attractive price online. The age of the music megastore appears all but over but for the handful of smaller stores which survived it, the future may not be as bleak as some imagine.

Mr Findlay says: 'If I was a bright 19-year-old now, I would still want to open a record shop because there will always be enthusiasts who would use them.

'It's about having the passion for music - something which got lost with the Virgins and HMV. It may not make you a millionaire but it's still a viable business. Every reasonably sized town in Scotland should have one.'

Yet in the entire country, fewer than 20 independent record shops remain. And their clientele is ageing fast. Once the most fashionable shops in town, they are in danger of becoming antique curiosities.

j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk

CAPTION(S):

Play it again: Listening to music in the record shop was once an exciting, social affair Rise and fall: David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. The album he released of the same name was the first bought by Jim Kerr of Simple Minds