The other day I took my first trip to Fopp since it re-opened. After Fopp’s flopp, HMV bought the name and six of the stores (a far cry from the 120-or-so stores there used to be). HMV probably bought it to stop Gordon Montgomery from making an easy comeback, but they have promised to run the remaining Fopp stores as Fopp themselves ran them.

Immediately people were wondering if HMV had bought the right stores. I guess they are in a much better position to know which stores are profitable and which are not. But they bought the Rose Street store in Edinburgh. It’s a good shop, but there are already two HMVs within a stone’s throw. The one on Cockburn Street was smaller but only has that dusty Avalanche for competition. And it was closer to the university, which, for purely self-interested reasons, made it automatically better for me.

Also, a lot of the point about Fopp was the fact that it wasn’t HMV. Nor was it some indie-wank shop. It was something in between, which I thought was just perfect.

During my trip there, I was pleased to see that almost nothing has changed in the Rose Street store. There are only very slight cosmetic differences that only the most anal people (like me) will notice. Price stickers are now HMV-style, as are the receipts. But apart from that, most things have pleasantly remained the same.

The prices are still in nice round numbers. There is none of that £X.99 nonsense. It feels good just to hand over a twenty and be done with the transaction with no fuss.

I did try to do my usual thing of looking for a cheap Can album, but although they had loads of Can albums, they were all £15! The same was true for Brian Eno. I guess it’s not inconceivable that this would have happened in the old Fopp, but it did ring a minor alarm bell. Hopefully it is just my imagination. Thankfully, in general, the prices are still pretty good. I bought four albums for £20 (including one Stereolab CD which was just £3! Bargain!), which is pretty good going.

There was something quite striking about my visit to Fopp though. I was browsing there in full knowledge that the shop was almost wiped off the face of the earth, so I was thinking about the business side of things as I was shopping. The thing I noticed above everything else was that almost every single other customer there was a middle-aged man. I was probably the youngest person in the shop. It’s true — kids just don’t buy music these days.

On my way down to Rose Street, I passed the folk specialist Coda store on Bank Street. I wondered to myself, “I wonder how long before that goes?” In fact, I have often wondered that to myself over the years (before today’s music retail woes), but that probably shows my narrow-mindedness about folk music. Today, I suppose most of its customers will be the more loyal middle-aged men. That was probably a curse just a few years ago. It’s surely a blessing now!

I am a big fan of the CD format, and I love to have a physical copy of any music that I have. Then it feels like I really own it, and is a signal that I really value the music rather than just downloading any old crappy MP3 and throwing it in the recycle bin if I don’t like it.

It’s a bit like a story I read about in a very exciting book called A Logic of Expressive Choice by Alexander A. Schuessler. It’s a bit dry, but it has some neat examples to demonstrate its points.

(I don’t have the book to hand, so my memory of this example is quite sketchy, but you will get the general idea.) One of them involved a man who, every year, would camp outside to buy tickets to something or other. He waited an extraordinarily long time to ensure that he was at the front of the queue so that he could get the best tickets.

One year the venue decided to just give him the best tickets anyway, as a kind of token of appreciation (or probably as a publicity stunt). The man was outraged and refused to accept the tickets. For him, his value came from the waiting, not from acquiring the tickets themselves. He took pride in waiting for ages. It was his way of saying to the world, “Look how much I love this thing! I will wait for ages to make sure I see it!” When the theatre offered him the tickets, he was robbed of his chance to express himself in this way.

I think I am the same with music. Sure, I could illegally download every song in existence for free. I could even download them legally and pay for them. But I wouldn’t have anything to show for it. I like to look at my music collection and think to myself, “blimey, I’ve got quite a lot of CDs now”. Even though this means that I am losing space in my room.

I think most people growing up these days won’t value music like this. They have access to far more music than they can possibly consume, and they just do it. They just download disposable albums without thinking about it and don’t give the music their full attention. (I can see myself as an old man with my pipe and slippers, fondly remembering the days of CDs, when youths respected music.)

But a lot of people are saying that CDs are doomed. Vinyl will still have its niche, but CDs won’t be around any longer. Imagine that! I could end up having the opposite dilemma to the previous generation — I will have to convert my entire CD collection into vinyl!

As much as I dislike this situation, it has to be said that there is not much going for music retailers these days. They are dropping like flies. And when they are not dropping like flies, they are hurriedly rearranging their deckchairs in preparation for the sinking.

HMV has launched its “next generation” stores. “Download hubs”, “gaming stations” and smoothie bars. Just don’t mention music.

Richard Branson has just sold his Virgin music stores. This is incredible because it is the first time in three decades that Richard Branson hasn’t had his fingers in the music retail pie. It was music retail where he started, so for Virgin to be pulling out of it altogether, you know that things are just not going well at all in the music retail world.

I am a big fan of the music discovery and social networking site Last.fm. I am also a lover of beautiful pointless graphs. So LastGraph was always going to be a winner for me.

The existence of LastGraph makes me so happy. Like Andrew Godwin, who wrote LastGraph, I read this webpage a while ago and thought to myself, “I want.” But I thought it was a bit of a long shot to expect anyone to provide such a service.

Obviously I was wrong! What’s more, there are plenty of different options to choose from, so once you’ve made one graph you can make another and look at it differently.

Unfortunately, it only goes back as far as the beginning of 2005, so the early part of my Last.fm history. But what remains is fascinating to look at. The snapshot I have posted above is from May–July 2007. For some reason I always get more nostalgic about music that I listened to during summer, so I’m pretty sure that looking back I will get a little bit misty-eyed about Justice, Simian Mobile Disco and Can (incidentally, they were all albums that I bought on my last trip to the pre-HMV Fopp).

If, for some reason, you are interested in seeing the entire graph, it is available to download here. But be warned — the PDF is quite a large file!

The colours represent how early I first listened to a band. Reds and oranges were the first bands I listened to; purples are the most recent and greens are in the middle. Glancing at my graph, it is clear how much more eclectic my listening habits are. As time goes on there are fewer large patches, and the reds have been squeezed out by a larger variety of colours.

Surprisingly, it is completely impossible to follow any band all the way through my graph. I think this is down to the fact that I tend to just put iTunes in shuffle mode and let it select albums itself. I suspect the same bands would crop up week after week if I tended to choose for myself.

Even so, I am amazed that I can only pick out Battles three times on my graph. I have been flat-out obsessed with them for over a year (and particularly since the release of Mirrored), but seemingly I have not listened to them as much as I had thought.

My theory is that when I am out and about (and therefore not scrobbling), I choose what album to listen to more often, so this is where I have listened to Battles the most. (I think this happened to Polar Bear as well, who I listened to a lot, but are nowhere to be seen on my Last.fm profile.)

Funnily, I can see plenty of patches where I listened to Eels a lot. I never understood why Eels appear so high up on my Last.fm profile (not just overall, but for the past 12 months as well). I’m not sure the graph has aided my understanding of this, but I have clearly listened to Eels a lot more often than I thought.

I just got an iPod, so I will be able to scrobble while I’m out and about as well. I predict an increase in both the amount of music and large patches appearing on the graph. I hope LastGraph sticks around because it will be really interesting to create more of these graphs to compare over time.

H/T lots of people including Plasticbag and Somefool.

There are no answers anywhere in sight. But, y’know, it’s the thought that counts. And a nice little banner.

I first smelled a rat about Fopp’s financial security last week while I was working in Cumbernauld. The Woolworths there has a Fopp directly opposite, and I noticed one night that it closed earlier than usual. The following day it never raised its shutters — it was “closed for stocktake”.

I thought that was really odd. The store must have only been open for about a week; two weeks maximum. Why would a store need to stocktake when it had only been open for a maximum of two weeks?

It does not take a genius to work out that something might have been amiss, but I never imagined that it would be a company-wide problem. I suspected it was just a problem with the Cumbernauld branch specifically, not the entire chain.

I considered the possibility that Fopp as a whole might be in trouble. But I quickly discarded this, given the fact that earlier in the year they had optimistically bought several of the Music Zone stores which had gone into administration at Christmas. That is not the behaviour of a company that is in trouble.

When I received a couple of texts from Twitter about the health of Fopp, alarm bells began to ring again. The Cumbernauld Fopp store with its shutters down did have wider significance. It seems as though Fopp is in major trouble.

After work I brought the Twitter messages up in a conversation. I learned that the also recently-opened Glenrothes store has also mysteriously had its shutters down recently.

I came home and immediately searched Google News for information on the situation with Fopp. Seemingly, every Fopp store in the country was 50 Fopp stores were closed last Friday for an “extraordinary stocktake” (whatever the hell that is), but the company bullishly reopened its doors the next day.

But yesterday Fopp halted its online ordering service and stopped accepting credit cards at its tills. That sounds like a company in major trouble.

But as if that wasn’t enough, this evening I have read (via DJ Martian) that some workers will not get their scheduled pay packets tomorrow. Moreover, some Fopp stores will not be opening their doors in the morning.

Sitting here today, it is easy to say that Fopp simply over stretched itself. Ever since this year began, with the acquisition of the already faltering Music Zone stores, Fopp had completely changed its position in the high street.

Not so long ago, it was the sort of place that you would only find in a major city — Dundee or Edinburgh were the closest stores to my town. Suddenly, Fopps were opening all over the shop, in places like Glenrothes and Cumbernauld (I do remember being surprised to see a Fopp there when I first saw it).

Somehow, it just didn’t seem right. In a way, suddenly you would be more likely to find a Fopp in any one town than an HMV. That’s how it felt to me. And that was a situation which — while I was glad about it — just didn’t seem to make sense.

For this reason, I had assumed that Fopp must have been in extraordinarily sound financial shape. Seemingly, that is not the case. It looks as though they have just overstretched themselves too far over these past few months.

If Fopp goes into administration, I would be immensely sorry to see it go. When I first visited a Fopp, I wasn’t terribly impressed. But I soon learned to love it.

In fact, Fopp is the most dangerous shop on the High Street. All too often I would enter a Fopp for a cursory browse, or looking for a particular release. I would always emerge with an armful of bargain £5 / £6 / £7 CDs that I hadn’t been looking for.

Just last week, the day before the mysterious stocktake, I went in to the Cumbernauld store to buy the new releases by Simian Mobile Disco and Justice. I came out with the Sneaker Pimps album that I had been putting off buying for many, many years. I also chose the cheapest of the Can CDs, to add to my slowly growing collection of Can CDs. Fopp was that kind of shop. You would surprise yourself with what you ended up buying.

If Fopp goes, what is left? Even though its recent expansion felt odd, Fopp was a trusty friend unlike no other record shop. Smaller indie shops feel dusty and unwelcoming. The likes of HMV are expensive and sometimes lack selection. Fopp is (was?) a perfect in-between situation.

When I visited the BBC News website today to look for news on Fopp, I instead found news about how HMV is struggling. If even HMV is feeling it, it is fair to say that High Street retailers — especially those specialising in entertainment — are in big, big trouble.

Without Fopp, it is fair to say I would probably no longer buy CDs on the High Street. I would be left with online retailers alone. But the obvious next question is: How long will I be buying CDs for, before the world goes MP3-only? What a sad world that would be.

Update: It is confirmed. BBC News: Fopp closes down its 105 stores.