Has this dog has his day?

One of the main stories in the news this morning is that of the plight of HMV over recent weeks, and the group’s steady decline over the past year. 60 stores are reportedly set to close in the next 12 months in an effort to curtail the costs and stabilise the group, which also incorporates Waterstone’s book shops. I, for one, hope that this does the trick.

Whilst it is definitely easier to download music from online retailers directly to your digital library, the death of the record store – even a huge corporate chain – would be a very sad occurrence indeed. There is a certain pleasure that can be derived from aimlessly meandering through the aisles of a music shop and stopping to peruse the various genres of music before remembering why it was exactly that you went in there in the first place. Oh yes, Mum wanted the new Alison Krauss CD for her birthday. Not really sure I can convince her to download iTunes and then give her a gift voucher when she actually wants to listen to it in her car.

So there’s an obvious need for physical copies of media, and as video formats such as Blu-Ray become more and more prevalent, downloading and storing files of such high quality would become a bit of a chore, so I don’t quite think the death knell has been sounded for CDs, DVDs and the like just yet. But that being said, there are some very interesting new features that are being developed to enrich (legally) download music and films. Sony Pictures have teamed up with iTunes to trial certain embedded ’extras’ into a handful of film releases available from the iTunes store. For example, you can do a text search on the film, which brings up a hit-list of every time a word was mentioned in the script, along with a link to that moment in the film. Users will also be able to “clip and share” scenes from the movie, so the days of going on to YouTube to find that line from Anchorman or the dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite to post on a friend’s Facebook page are potentially numbered. The music business is not neglected either, as a playlist of songs from these movies is available too, complete with track previews and links to where you can buy them. Where then does this leave stores like HMV?

Well at the moment The Unofficial Apple Weblog has outlined some support issues meaning that theses bonus extras can only be viewed on a 1st generation Apple television and the desktop version of iTunes. And the 2nd generation Apple TV won’t play back iTunes Extras content. So at the moment there is still time for ailing record shops and movie stores to try to turn their fortunes around. The demand for physical copies of music and film is entirely down to individual preference. Maybe I’m old school, but the thought of having all of my CDs and DVDs nicely housed in racks or on shelves really appeals to me. Either way, one common factor in the physical versus digital debate is that we need to keep our content organised. Sure, for the odd obscure track that I don’t necessarily want to buy a whole album just to hear I will go to iTunes. And whilst any CD that I buy will ultimately end up on my computer and populating my library, there’s still nothing quite like going into a shop and handing over my hard-earned cash to walk out with something tangible in return that I can hold in my hands.