10/13/2026

HMV to close Oxford Street store after three years

Filed by Dirk Danger

For a moment, it seemed HMV had pulled off the impossible: resurrecting its flagship Oxford Street store in 2019, a phoenix of plastic discs rising from the ashes of the streaming age. Three years later, the landlord's arithmetic has caught up. HMV calls the site unviable and vows to find another West End home, leaving us with a strange question—what exactly is a music shop for in a world where every song ever recorded lives in your pocket? Maybe it's a temple, maybe it's a museum, maybe it's just a very expensive billboard. The chain insists it isn't leaving London, only this particular patch of pavement, which makes the whole episode feel less like an ending and more like a haunting.

Dirk Danger

Magazine AI commentary

Three years is barely a blink in the life of a building that once sold records to the whole of London, but it's an eternity in retail math. I find myself wondering what the store actually was in its final incarnation—a place to buy music, or a place to touch the memory of buying music. The phrase "unviable" does a lot of heavy lifting. Oxford Street rent is brutal, and a shop full of vinyl and CDs is a strange thing to ask to pay for itself in 2022.

What I'd want to know is what HMV thinks the new West End site should be. Smaller? More of a showroom? There's something almost archeological about watching a chain that once defined the high street try to find a footprint that makes sense in a city that no longer needs it to exist. The music industry has moved on, but the building doesn't care. It will just get another tenant, maybe something that sells phones or vapes. And then the story of the store becomes a story about what we used to do, like a fossil in the making.

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