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The British entertainment retailer HMV has operated a number of international subsidiaries during its history.
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The British entertainment retailer HMV has operated a number of international subsidiaries during its history.
HMV Ireland opened its first shop in Ireland in 1986.1986. [1] It later expanded, with shops across the country. It ran into financial difficulty in the early 2010s, and by August 2016, all its shops in the Republic of Ireland had closed down and replaced with an online shop. [2]
HMV re-entered the Irish market with a shop on Dublin's Henry Street in June 2023. [3]
In July 2007, HMV Japan, which operates 62 shops, was sold to DSM Investment Catorce. The stores and HMV Japan website continue to trade as HMV, but is no longer owned by HMV Group. [4]
Since JVC Kenwood Holdings (through its JVC and Victor Entertainment subsidiaries) controls the His Master's Voice trademark in Japan, HMV Japan used a stylised gramophone of its own design as its trademark. As with the former U.S. and Canadian operations, HMV Japan's use of the initials "HMV" has never been challenged.
On 28 October 2010 the Japanese convenience store giant Lawson acquired all shares of HMV Japan from Daiwa Securities SMBCPI for ¥ 1.8 billion. KK HMV Japan became a part of Lawson, and was renamed KK Lawson HMV Entertainment (株式会社 ローソンHMVエンタテイメント) on 1 December in the same year. Terms of the deal were published on official websites. [5] HMV is known right now as HMV & BOOKS.
In 1989 the HMV Group established its first Australian store in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta, closely followed by a second store in Chatswood in that same year. In 1990, HMV opened its flagship store in the Sydney central business district. The 1,207-square-meter superstore in Pitt Street Mall was the largest music store in the Southern Hemisphere and sold more CDs than any other store in the country. It was also awarded the ARIA Charts Store of the Year on three occasions. By 1998, a further 27 stores were opened in key retail centres on the eastern seaboard of Australia, including other large footprint stores at Melbourne's Bourke Street Mall and Brisbane's 585-square-meter Queen Street Mall store. [6]
In March 2000, HMV made local headlines when their larger rival, Sanity, signed a five-year deal with Festival Mushroom Records for a three-year online exclusivity window on all tracks downloaded from that label at Sanity's website. Sanity's competitors and other online services were meant to be blocked from Festival Mushroom's catalogue for that period unless Sanity agreed to deal with them. Chaos.com and Leading Edge Music both made public threats to boycott Festival Mushroom's content, but HMV Australia (whose website did not offer downloading) followed through, removing all CDs from their domestic stores, adding they would do the same overseas. By the next week, Festival Mushroom backed down, stating Sanity would simply be the wholesaler of their digital downloads for the next three years, requiring them to make all products available to other retailers at the time of release. [7] [8] [9]
In October 2005, Sanity's owner, Brazin Limited acquired the Australian operations of HMV for A$4 million (£1.7 million). The HMV Group's agreement with Brazin was to phase out the HMV brand in Australia by 2010. Immediately after this acquisition of HMV's 32 outlets, this put Brazin at its peak with its 74 Virgin Megastore and Virgin At Myer stores, in addition to Sanity's 215, and EzyDVD's 63 outlets around the country (not counting non-entertainment retail chains within Brazin, such as Bras N Things) and was by far Australia's largest entertainment retailer with close to 43% of the music retail market. However, most HMV stores in Australia had very high overhead costs due to their large footprints and expensive locations, thus most were gradually closed upon the end of rental leases. The remaining stores were re-branded to Sanity over the next five years. [10] [11] The horizontal merger was approved by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission that same month leaving Brazin to merge marketing and general operations within the one entertainment division. Also in October, Brazin officially launched its Pulse loyalty card after a year of testing in the market. It worked by giving the customer one point for every dollar spent across Brazin's store network, receiving a $5 discount voucher or other offers once 100 points were reached. [12]
By December 2006, HMV had already shrunk to 22 outlets from its peak of 32 the year before. [13]
HMV's Australian flagship store in Pitt Street Mall closed on 31 August 2007, when the Mid City Centre shopping centre it was located in was closed for renovation, and the large Bourke Street Mall store closed on 19 February 2008. By mid-2010 the last HMV store was closed in Brisbane by Sanity, and the last re-branded HMV store trading as Sanity closed at Indooroopilly Shopping Centre in December 2012.
HMV established a subsidiary in Canada in 1988 following the purchase of Mister Sound by EMI Music Canada. In June 2011, HMV sold the business for £2 million to Hilco. [14] As of 2012, HMV Canada had 113 stores. It remained a separate business to HMV in the UK, despite both companies being owned by Hilco. In January 2017 HMV Canada announced the closure of its last 102 stores, with a confirmed date of April 30 that year. [15]
HMV stores in the U.S. did not have rights to the His Master's Voice trademark; in those countries, that trademark is part of the RCA trademark portfolio owned by Technicolor SA and licensed to others. HMV was not prevented from using its initials in the U.S.
HMV had a handful of stores in the Eastern United States, which in their final years were overseen by HMV's Canadian operations. In the 1990s they had a significant presence in Manhattan.
Poor real estate decisions made in the early 1990s rendered the United States stores uneconomical and HMV gradually extricated itself from leases, and the final store in the United States, having lost £500,000 in 2003 and £1 million in 2004, closed on 3 November 2004. [16]
In 1994, the first HMV store was opened in the shopping centre Windsor House on 311, Gloucester Road, Hong Kong. HMV began opening stores in new shopping malls. The Tsim Sha Tsui flagship store, spanning 4 storeys at the corner of Peking Road and Hankow Road, was the largest record store in the territory until 2006, when it was re-located to another smaller location on Hankow Road. [17] During the 2000s, HMV Hong Kong formed a partnership with Commercial Radio Hong Kong; one of their channels was renamed HMV864 and all HMV stores in Hong Kong tuned into that channel. The prices on their products especially those without promotion and discount are often higher than many independent record stores. HMV Hong Kong was the second place after the UK to launch in-store digital kiosks, and the first in Asia. HMV Hong Kong formerly used the same stylised gramophone logo as HMV Japan, but has since switched to the Nipper the Dog logo that HMV UK uses, but without the gramophone. At present there are four stores, plus a HMV-themed restaurant.
HMV was the second international music store established in Singapore, after Tower Records, which later closed down. It operates one store in Singapore, at Marina Square. The former store at 313@Somerset (which replaced one formerly in The Heeren) closed in November 2013, [18] after closing the other at the CityLink underground mall. It is generally higher priced than other independent shops, and local chains such as Gramophone and That CD Shop offer lower prices. HMV is the only store that sells games, T-shirts, books and audio gear in addition to music and video.
Deloitte announced on 28 February 2013 that Hong Kong-based private equity firm AID Partners Capital Holdings had bought the businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore. In addition, the firm acquired the rights to the HMV brand in China, Macau and Taiwan. [19]
HMV closed its last Singapore store in 2015. [20] In December 2018, HMV announced that it would close all its Hong Kong locations. [21]
The first overseas branch of EMI was established in India in 1901. An important milestone was reached a year later, when it made the first audio recording in the subcontinent, of singer Gauhar Jan in 1902.
However, fortunes for the fledgling offshoot increased dramatically when the Indian cinema talkies exploded in popularity in 1931. This led to a surge in demand for film-based songs and soundtracks, and the company rapidly expanded production to cater to this new and growing market. Indeed, this music genre continued to grow year-on-year, and accounted for a sizeable share of its output for the life of the organisation.
The Gramophone Company of India was incorporated in 1946, and, in addition to fulfilling the needs of the home market, soon began exporting popular and culturally significant recordings around the globe - particularly to areas with large Indian expat populations. The company existed until 1985, when it was taken over by the RPG Group. On 2 November 2000, the company changed its name to Saregama India Ltd. Saregama controls a large repertoire of Indian film and non-film music, spanning a century. [22]
The Italian emanation of the HMV record label was La voce del padrone (Italian for "His masters voice"). From 1904, Gramophone Company records were published and distributed in Italy by Saif (Società Anonima Italiana di Fonotopia), a company based in Milan. When the Gramophone Company merged with Columbia in 1931 to form EMI, Saif in turn merged with Columbia's Italian arm, SNG (Società Nazionale del Grammofono).
His Master's Voice (HMV) was the name of a major British record label created in 1901 by The Gramophone Co. Ltd. The phrase was coined in the late 1890s from the title of a painting by English artist Francis Barraud, which depicted a dog named Nipper listening to a wind-up disc gramophone and tilting his head. In the original, unmodified 1898 painting, the dog was listening to a cylinder phonograph. The painting was also famously used as the trademark and logo of the Victor Talking Machine Company, later known as RCA Victor. The painting was originally offered to James Hough, manager of Edison-Bell in London, but he declined, saying "dogs don't listen to phonographs". Barraud subsequently visited The Gramophone Co. of Maiden Lane in London where the manager William Barry Owen offered to purchase the painting if it were revised to depict their latest Improved Gramophone model. Barraud obliged, and Owen bought the painting from Barraud for £100.
A variety store is a retail store that sells general merchandise, such as apparel, auto parts, dry goods, toys, hardware, furniture, and a selection of groceries. It usually sells them at discounted prices, sometimes at one or several fixed price points, such as one dollar, or historically, five and ten cents. Variety stores, as a category, are different from general merchandise superstores, hypermarkets, warehouse clubs, grocery stores, or department stores.
Virgin Megastores is an international entertainment retailing chain, founded in early 1976 by Richard Branson as a record shop on London's Oxford Street.
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American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. is an American clothing and accessories retailer headquartered at SouthSide Works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1977 by brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman as a subsidiary of Retail Ventures, Inc., a company that also owned and operated Silverman's Menswear. The Silvermans sold their ownership interests in 1991 to Jacob Price of Knoxville, Tennessee. American Eagle Outfitters is the parent company of Aerie and Todd Snyder.
Vaughan Mills is a regional outlet mall located at the southeast quadrant of the Highway 400 and Rutherford Road interchange in Vaughan, Ontario, just south of Canada's Wonderland. It is one of the largest enclosed shopping centres in Canada, and the largest shopping mall in York Region with almost 1.3 million square feet (120,000 m2) of retail space. The complex has over 200 retail stores, restaurants, and entertainment outlets.
Sunrise Records and Entertainment, trading as HMV, is a British based music and entertainment retailer, currently operating in the European countries of Belgium, Ireland and the United Kingdom
Tower Records is an international retail franchise and online music store that was formerly based in Sacramento, California, United States. From 1960 until 2006, Tower operated retail stores in the United States, which closed when Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. Tower Records was purchased by a separate entity and was not affected by the retail store closings.
A big-box store is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The term "big-box" references the typical appearance of buildings occupied by such stores.
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Our Price was a chain of record stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland from 1971 until 2004.
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A record shop or record store is a retail outlet that sells recorded music. In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, record shops only sold gramophone records, but over the 20th century, record shops sold the new formats that were developed, such as eight track tapes, compact cassettes and compact discs (CDs). Today in the 21st century, record stores sell CDs, vinyl records and in some cases, DVDs of movies, TV shows, cartoons and concerts. Some record stores also sell music-related items such as posters of bands or singers, -related clothing items and even merchandise such as bags and coffee mugs.
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HMV Ireland is an entertainment retailing company operated in Ireland by Hilco Capital Ireland. The first incarnation was first established by HMV Group Plc as part of their international expansion into Ireland and Canada in 1986. The first store in Ireland established was at HMV on Grafton Street in Dublin. HMV have announced their return to the Irish market, and a new store opened in Henry Street in Dublin in 30th June 2023.
HMV Canada Ltd. is a Canadian entertainment retailer, owned by Hilco. The company was originally a subsidiary of HMV in the United Kingdom until it was sold to Hilco Capital in 2011. HMV itself would later be bought by Hilco in 2013. HMV Canada's head office was located in Etobicoke. The retailer ceased operations in Spring 2017 and returned in February 2024.
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Separately, HMV said that the sale of the Japan business to DSM Investment Catorce, would allow it to focus on countries where it was a market leader. Opening in Tokyo's Shibuya district in 1990, HMV Japan now has 62 stores, with about 40 million visitors a year.
...HMV USA, where the last store of which closed on 3 November 2004."; "...a £1.0m loss last year and £0.8m of losses made in HMV USA in the prior year...