More free legal music

(I've always wanted to start a piece with the words 'why' and 'quite' with the first line in brackets. So here goes...)

Quite why, in the days that music downloads rule the audio waves, HMV doesn't offer an in-store facility to download music on to your pod or player is beyond me. You can do it on the website. In spite of this anomaly. HMV seems to be doing pretty well. It has just bought some of the vacant Zavvi stores.

Visiting Zavvi with its ridiculous over-the-top security presence often felt like you were visiting a crime scene rather than a shop with a few CDs and loads more CDs out of stock. I gave up with them ages ago. And this is someone who used to spend all day every Saturday in the Eldon Square Virgin Megastore who still spends stupid amounts of money on music. Dear old defunct Woolies frequently offered a similar experience; like visiting a badly organised jail with heavily guarded sweets, cheap tellies and Shania Twain CDs lining the aisles instead of cells. HMV take note - from my recent experience you seem to be filling the gap on the security front these days, it's not pleasant. 

Aside in small print: I did a quick reccy yesterday in the High Street. At 1.30pm, peak lunchtime shop-a-thon time, the shops were almost all, almost completely empty - apart from Tesco (big queue at the cigarette counter) and WH Smiths (big queue at the cigarette counter). The Smiths branch is closing down at the end of the month.

If High Street retailers won't adapt the game's up. Sky has just anounced an online music service to rival iTunes. Amazon and Play.com are doing a fine job offering music downloads. There a loads of others. But these are the paid-for ones.

The free legal stuff is incredible. If you haven't checked out Spotify do it now because, frankly, I can't work out how they plan to make proper money.

And for today, here's another legal one.

Wolfgang's Vault has a smallish but worthy archive of concert and interview footage of some of the greatest bands. It won't suit people into the more modern stuff on show in last night's Brits - but hey what's modern about Duffy? There's some interesting 'old' U2 footage that fans may want to check out. They were on the Brits too.

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/

You need to do a quick registration but unlike Spotify and our erstwhile music retailers it shouldn't be blocked by any workplace's overzealous security presence: the firewall, that is.

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Comments

[TB]

Eldon Square never had a Virgin Megastore, you should remember it is, or was, actually in Monument Mall.

[Richard Browning]

I'm always happy to stand corrected but Monument Mall was built, I think, in the 1990s. This was way before that. I bought Roxanne by The Police on blue vinyl when it came out if you want to work it out. I don't. Yep, I'm that old.

It's possible that it wasn't called a megastore officially but it was big and it was mega.

Cheers

Richard.