“What musicians want,” said composer Sir Edward Elgar as he inaugurated the first HMV shop in London in 1921, “is more listeners, and the dissemination of good music by the gramophone will give us a new public which will … listen to it with true appreciation.”
Sadly this historical establishment closed its Oxford Street doors in 2019, after the company went into administration, chiefly due to the burgeoning popularity of digital music platforms and the online sale of music.
Now, after a four-year hiatus, the store has reopened just in time for Christmas, riding the wave of an unexpected resurgence in vinyl records, CDs, and even cassette tapes. In an era where an infinite music catalogue is a mere click away, the question is: why would anyone choose to queue up for a piece of plastic?
