When I was younger I used to love going to HMV to buy a CD and add it to what was a very impressive CD collection, if I do say so myself.
However, like the rest of the world I have moved on from buying a physical copy of the new Pixie Lott album (which is amazing by the way) and I am instead listening to it on Spotify, possibly purchasing it on iTunes or god forbid downloading it illegally!
HMV has been one of the many victims of the digital evolution and has been desperately looking for ways to change its model to still be relevant to consumers. One of its earlier strategies was to focus on selling headphones and concert tickets and relying less on selling actual music. Admittedly I do buy my overpriced headphones at HMV, but is this the brands salvation? I don’t think so.
Today HMV announced round two of its resuscitation. It is teaming up in the UK with video-on-demand (VOD) movie rental provider FilmFlex Movies to launch its Hmvon-demand movie service, which sounds promising on the surface due to the fact VOD is a major buzz category at the moment, but when you look under the hood it is all just a little unfortunate.
The new service is only available via the web on the PC with future plans to extend the service to a range of digital devices. HMV, this IS the future and you should be offering those services now. Do you think that people are walking around with phones the size of bricks because they need to see bigger numbers when they make a call? No, they are consuming media and launching this service with PC-only capabilities is a fail.
Did I forget to mention that there are also plans to EVENTUALLY offer download-to-own and cloud-based services?
Who wants to help me get a head start on writing HMV’s obituary?
