More news and speculation about what might happen with Sunrise Records and HMV UK
The music retail world began a rebuild this week when Sunrise Records of Ancaster, Ontario, came to the rescue of HMV UK, which had slipped into bankruptcy for the second time. No purchase price was announced by some people think the number might be $10 million.
Sunrise will get 100 HMV UK stores and close 27. The new number of jobs saved is 1,847.
Two questions have emerged. First, will the HMV stores be rebranded as Sunrise Records? Unknown, but doing that would be risky. HMV is a music retailing brand that goes back to 1921, so it has value. Then again, it’s been terribly damaged by its recent performance.
Second question: Could this mean a return of the HMV brand to Canada? Remember that Sunrise took over more than 70 HMV Canada stores on its way to expanding to 84 outlets from coast-to-coast. Sunrise CEO Doug Putnam would only say “unlikely, but definitely possible.”
Watch this space for more.
While I’m happy that I still have physical stores to visit to buy cd’s, Sunrise is still seriously lagging in the area of a functional website. You can’t look up available titles, there’s no stock locator function, it’s truly useless.
They had some struggles with their HMV takeover, as far as inventory goes. There was only so much money to go around with all the labels, so there was a lot of product unavailable in the west for several months until they were able to free up cash for stock from other distributors.
Things have improved quite a bit in that regard, but they still have some ground to make up.
The West Ed store used to have a huge wall full of hundreds if not a thousand different concert dvd’s and blurays, it’s a small rack now.
At the end of the day though, I’m happy I still have stores to go to for my cd’s. I’m not ready to give up the library and stream everything just yet.