House of Comments - Episode 44 - The Death of the High Street

Episode 44 of the House of Comments podcast "The Death of the High Street" was recorded on Sunday and is out today. This week myself and Emma Burnell discuss the future of the economy in the context of the recently announced high street troubles for HMV, Jessops, Blockbuster and before them Comet and others. How will our country and its workforce adjust to the new realities and can the state plan for this future or should we just go with the flow? You won't be surprised to hear that me and Emma have somewhat different views on this!

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You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 44 - The Death of the High Street’ on Audioboo

If you are a political blogger and wish to be considered as a future guest please drop me an e-mail at markreckons@live.co.uk.

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us and especially to Audioboo's James O'Malley who has helped us out getting relaunched. James is also editor of The Pod Delusion podcast which is about "interesting things" and is well worth a listen too! We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

HMV's demise was sadly inevitable

The moment I saw Napster in the year 2000 I knew the game was up. It was just a matter of time.

HMV has sadly had to call in the administrators. I feel very sorry for those who are going to lose their jobs. I have experienced redundancy myself and I know it can be very difficult, especially with the economy the way it is at the moment.

I have seen some, mainly left-wing activists try to blame "austerity" for this outcome. I'm afraid they are very wrong-headed about that.

This day was inevitable. The idea that a business model to supply music, TV and films to the public that relies on physically creating the media, boxing it up, storing it in a warehouse, shipping it between depot locations and ultimately to a store, unloading and sorting the products onto the shelves, paying rent for city-centre locations, paying lots of staff to man/woman the stores and interact with the public and all the other costs associated with running an enterprise such as HMV could survive when the public can now purchase those things electronically and download them to a computer or set-top box immediately was unsustainable.

It's nothing to do with austerity. To try and argue that HMV should have survived is the equivalent of 15th century people trying to shore up the position of the scribes as the printing press came of age. Unsustainable.

Even though in 2000 Napster had a clunky interface, not that much variety and you needed to be quite technically savvy to use it combined with the very slow dial-up internet speeds making it impractical to download lots of music that didn't matter. I had seen that downloading music was possible. It was obvious that the infrastructure of things like iTunes and Spotify would come in time. It was also not much of a leap to see that Moore's law and the trajectory of increases in download speeds and storage capacity would soon make TV and films downloadable too.

Napster in its original form was shut down soon after I first used it. But its successors both legitimate and less so have completely revolutionised the world of entertainment consumption in just 13 years.

That was going to happen no matter how the economy was doing. You can't stop progress and we shouldn't want to stop it.

We need to adjust to the new reality.