A UK Record Store Similar To HMV or Tower

Cafe Society
1

I remember back in 2001 I used to order online from a store in the UK. Now it was not HMV but the website had a similar look to the online stores like Tower, and HMV and Virgin Records.

I can’t recall the name of it now. I do know that it had a co.uk web address and that it also had physical locations in London.

Although for all I know it it doesn’t have to be a British store. It could’ve just had locations in London and happened to have a .UK web address.

Of course by now it could long be out of business, but does anyone have any of other stores like HMV? I know it wasn’t HMV or Virgin Records.

Any guesses?

2

Zavvi??

3

I was thinking Zavvi too - it’s what Virgin stores were reinvented as. I thought they’d gone bust, but they still seem to be selling online

4

Yeah, sounds like Zavvi.

I think though that the name was picked up for online sales by someone else after they were liquidated.

5

It could be Fopp.

They no longer seem to have a separate online presence since being ‘saved’ by HMV, but they do have some physical stores (including one in London).

Apart from Amazon, and HMV of course, the big online retailers of CDs in the UK are CDwow (http://www.cdwow.co.uk/) and Play (http://www.play.co.uk/) both of which do not have brick and mortar stores, but are able to offer cheaper CDs by shipping from the Channel Islands and thus avoiding VAT.

OB

6

If it was 2001 then it wouldn’t have been Zavvi - the shops would have still been Virgin Megastores back then.

The only other record chain I can think of that might have been in operation at the time was Our Price, although it would have been in a fairly advanced state of decline by that point.

There were a couple of short-lived online retailing disasters at the time like jungle.co.uk and musicbox.co.uk but they never really had a physical presence so that rules them out.

7

MVC?