HMV Canada Is Dead, and I Might Be One of the Few Who'll Miss It

When I was 14 years old, I would spend all my hard earned babysitting cash on whatever obscure rock CDs I could find in the aisles of my local HMV. In 2007, I didn't have the option of googling artists on my phone before buying their album. I couldn't listen on Spotify before handing over the small amount of money I had to my name. If the cover art was cool or if an HMV employee told me I'd like it, I bought it. As a teenager, I could spend hours in HMV without realizing any time had passed. Maybe it was because I was a weird punk rock kid who would rather listen to her old Discman than shop for clothes, or maybe it was the comfort I felt when getting lost in stacks and stacks of music.

I applied to HMV five times before getting hired, and needless to say, I was thrilled to become a member of the secret club of misfits that got paid for talking about music and movies. I worked there for nearly three years before quitting, but then somehow found myself back this past Christmas season. I told my coworkers I was coming back because I needed the extra cash on top of my full-time job, but really I missed my friends. I missed the familiarity. I missed talking to people about music. In my time at HMV, I worked at three locations, bought hundreds of CD's and made countless friends, both with coworkers and customers. It was the best part-time job I ever had. It put me through university. It fed my obsession with music.

And then, on Jan. 27, my phone started blowing up with messages. HMV Canada announced that they were closing their doors due to a large amount of debt that had gone unpaid. Facebook status after Facebook status, I watched my friends -- people with families, people with mortgages, people who have never worked anywhere else -- lose their jobs. While this isn't ideal, the situation is much larger than people simply losing their jobs. Retail stores go under all the time. It'll be tough for a while, but my friends will find other employment. What I'm having trouble grasping is what the death of HMV means for music culture. Nick Williams, HMV CEO, said in an interview with Billboard that young people are less into buying music than the generation ahead of them. From the standpoint of someone who was actually behind a register, selling the music, that's true. And that's what's startling.

As much as it's a cliché, music does bring people together. I think about my regular customers who would come in specifically to see me and ask what new rock was worth spending money on. I'd put a CD in their hands and they would buy it. They trusted me. The customer-employee relationship was different at HMV than at any other retail store. For the most part, young people just weren't having it. I keep remembering a conversation that I had with a young girl, in her late teens, when Drake's Views came out. She said she wouldn't buy the album because she only liked "Hotline Bling," so she'd just download that song and that was it. I asked her if she had actually listened to the whole album. She said no.

When you buy a physical copy, you feel obligated to listen to the whole album because you paid money for it. As a result, you discover that a non-mainstream song on the album is actually your favourite. You don't get that if you're only downloading one track, or only listening to pre-made top 40 playlists on Spotify. The whole craft of putting together an album is gone when you're only downloading singles. I know you can counter that argument with Apple Music, which allows you to easily download full albums. But what happens when your iPhone runs out of space? You delete an album you don't listen to much anymore and replace it with a new one. Your music is just constantly being recycled. Digital copies of music don't resonate in the long-term. But that physical copy of an album you bought five years ago can still be found in the glove compartment of your car. If streaming and downloading is our only means of consuming music, no one will know how to talk about music anymore; no one will know what it means to connect with someone through sharing music. HMV was a watering hole for music fans and now we must rely on an algorithm to help us find new artists. Those face-to-face connections with employees, people who were really fucking passionate about selling music, are gone.

I'm not mourning the closing of a store; I'm mourning the fact that people who were really good at selling music can't utilize that skill anymore. I'm mourning the fact that other 14-year-olds won't spend their hard earned babysitting money on mysterious albums that were produced before their time. Shopping for physical copies of CDs is now going to be considered "antiquing." The people who really care will travel far and wide to get their hands on this ancient artifact and the people who could care less will never understand what it means to connect with another human being when you both reach for the same back-catalogue CD in the stacks at HMV.

Photo by the author.
Bethany Bowles is a writer living in Waterloo. She's on Twitter.