What was hmv

Site powered by Webvision Cloud. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. More on HMV. The backlash against the album was so huge that it led to the creation of the Obscene Publications Committee, which would go on to ban the sale of all records by Crass, Dead Kennedys and others. The s kicked off on a brighter note and in a nationwide search was conducted for a new mascot to represent Nipper, run in conjunction with newspaper The Daily Mirror.

The winning dog, a Jack Russell cross named Toby from Doncaster, would go on to represent Nipper for the rest of the decade, serving in the role for nine years and meeting plenty of celebrities on the way.

That same year, hmv also began to sell Compact Discs for the first time. The CD format had actually launched two years earlier in , but EMI had been slow to adopt the format since it meant paying royalties to rivals Sony and Phillips. The new store ushered in an era of large-scale live events and signings — most of which went smoothly, although some did cause their fair share of chaos.

A appearance at the store by teen pop sensations Bros attracted more than 5, screaming fans, who completely blocked off the whole of Oxford Street. The event had to be abandoned after 20 minutes and it reportedly took two hours to restore traffic flows to normal. Several more would open in the following years, including one at 72nd and Broadway and another in Times Square.

The event was even marked by the creation of a new game starring Nipper himself. In hmv passed yet another milestone, opening its th store at Fort Retail Park in Birmingham, with the ribbon cut by Robbie Williams and the occasion marked by live performances from both Williams and Van Morrison.

The following year, hmv also became the first music retailer to launch a transactional website, allowing music lovers to choose from over , CDs, cassettes and vinyl records to buy online. By the end of the s, the advent of the mp3 format and the rise of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Limewire had begun to present a threat to physical media such as CDs, and not just because of piracy.

It was also about convenience, though, and in Steve Jobs, the mercurial head of Apple Computers, launched the iPod, a product that would do for the mp3 what the Sony Walkman had done for the cassette many years earlier. There were some big changes, though, not least the closure in of the original hmv store at Oxford Street as the store was relocated to slightly larger premises six doors down at No. Two years later, hmv was floated on the London Stock Exchange and became a public company for the first time in its history.

Continuing to expand and grow, hmv opened its th store in Galway, Ireland in , and the following year even launched its own radio station to be broadcast internally across its stores: Channel hmv. A year later the first of a series of acquisitions would arrive with the purchase of book chain Ottakers, which subsequently merged with Waterstones to give hmv ownership. Then in came the global financial crash. High street retailers were some of the hardest hit in the chaos that ensued, with many long-established names such as Woolworths, who had once been a competitor, disappearing from view.

Music retailer Zavvi, who had taken over the chain of stores previously run by Virgin, also retreated to an online-only presence as the harsh realities of the situation started to bite.

By this point, however, hmv was still large and resilient enough to ride the initial wave of fallout from the crash and even expanded further into the territory into live music, purchasing promoter Mean Fiddler and forming MAMA Group, which would run festivals such as Global Gathering and The Great Escape, as well as purchasing the Hammersmith Apollo. Eventually, though, a combination of steadily falling sales of physical media due to the rise of downloading and the emergence in of Spotify and then other streaming services such as Netflix - as well as other economic factors such as rising rents and changes in UK tax law that dented the profitability of its online sales - all began to take their toll.

By , HMV began to expand, first in London and then through the rest of the country. In just six years, it doubled in size and became the UK's largest music retailer. Our Price grew from its humble beginnings in London's Finchley Road, specialising in cassettes and eight tracks, to takeover as the country's second-biggest music seller after Woolworths, and Richard Branson opened his flagship Virgin Megastores a stone's throw from HMV on Oxford Street in But come the s, with the introduction of the compact disc and a 50,ft flagship store opening in a new Oxford Street premises, HMV was back in the game.

The chain was at the heart of the invention of in-store appearances by the biggest acts of the day. Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Madonna, David Bowie and Kate Bush were just some of the multi-million selling artists to grace its stores, signing CDs and playing exclusive sets for those who managed to squeeze in between the record racks. The s saw more growth in sales for HMV and more expansion as the rise of grunge and hip hop dominated the charts.

The chain opened its th store in and McCartney returned to Oxford Street to re-launch its flagship, with more than 5, people turning up to watch. And as the DVD format rose in popularity, HMV jumped onboard, helping the company expand to more than stores by In the s, more stars continued to flock to the shops to sell their wares, including Beyonce, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga.

The two led a happy and fulfilling life of eight years together. When Nipper passed away at 11 years, Francis undertook to paint a picture of him listening to his favourite Edison cylinder phonograph, which was the latest technology to record and play sound.

He tried selling it to the Edison company, but was rebuffed with the comment that dogs do not listen to music.

Much of Indian music industry owes its origin to an American musician called Frederick Gaisberg. So the newly founded Gramophone Company needed a sizeable number of recordings to facilitate acceptability and familiarity. The Gramophone Company was founded in London by Emile Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone record in But as explained earlier, recordings were hard to come by, and they needed a lot of those to be taken seriously as a record label.

In a post-digital world, it is difficult to conceive that recording sound was an elaborate, eight-step process which Frederick Gaisberg put down in his diary for posterity. He and his brother William recorded a bevy of international music performers, and then they set sail for India in search of something new and unexplored. It was September After spending some time in Ceylon, Fred Gaisberg landed in the bustling Indian metropolis then known as Calcutta, now called Kolkata.

After dinner, they — the Indian Bengali babus and the Europeans and Americans — sat together at a large salon and were entertained by nautch girls, or courtesans. These courtesans were often extremely talented youngsters.

Many of them were accomplished artistes, classically trained in music and dance. One of them was the thumri exponent Gauhar Jaan, all of 29, who Frederick encountered at this gathering and describes thus: "Her crowning adornment was a large diamond fastened on the side of her nose.

Her teeth were quite red from betel-nut chewing. Her chewing habit necessitated the presence of a bearer following her about with a silver cuspidor into which she would empty her mouthful, much to the distraction of their charms.

She terminated each song with a most cleverly executed muscle-dance.