What with the state of the music industry – especially music retail – in absolute shatters, I was a little bit shocked to drive past this today..
Music chain HMV is moving into the live arena, taking over 11 British music venues.
The record shop is teaming up with the MAMA Group – owners of venues including the Barfly – in a new join venture.
Their agreement affects 11 venues, including London’s venues Hammersmith Apollo, The Forum, Heaven, The Garage, Jazz Café, Borderline, G-A-Y and G-A-Y Late, plus Edinburgh’s Picture House, Birmingham’s Institute and Moshulu in Aberdeen.
The Apollo will now be known as HMV Apollo, while The Forum becomes HMV Forum, the Edinburgh and Birmingham venues will also bear the shop’s name, while four future halls will be renamed via the joint venture.
In an unrelated move, HMV have also announced they are teaming up with ticket agency Seatem to sell tickets.
“I am pleased that we have taken our first steps beyond the current three-year plan into the ‘live’ space,” said HMV MD and Group CEO Simon Fox of the deals. “Music is very much part of our DNA, and by extending the HMV brand into the growing live music and entertainment market, our customers will be able as never before to access and experience music in all of its forms through HMV.”
I thought The Garage had closed down? Does that mean HMV are re-opening the venue? Great news if that’s the case.. what with so many venues being closed down as of late.
Further reading:
So not one but two rather interesting announcements from His Master’s Voice yesterday.
First confirmation that the entertainment retailer is buying 14 stores off its collapsing rival Zavvi in a move that will bring the HMV brand to various towns or shopping centres where it hasn’t previously had a presence. Five of the fourteen are in Ireland – the Irish version of Zavvi having also gone into administration a week after its UK counterpart. That part of the deal will see HMV arrive in Dundalk, Dundrum, Limerick, Newbridge and at Dublin’s Liffey Valley shopping centre. In the UK, HMV will takeover Zavvi stores in Bournemouth, Crewe, Glasgow (x2), Peterborough, Plymouth, Salisbury, Southend and Stockton-on-Tees.
The deal should save about 269 Zavvi jobs.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, HMV announced it was forming a new joint venture with the ever-growing music enterprise the MAMA Group which will see the retailer move into the live music sector. The two firms will become joint owners of a new company that will take the Mean Fiddler name (a name MAMA gained the rights to when it bought most of the Mean Fiddler venue network). That new company will in turn take ownership of 11 venues in the existing MAMA Group empire, namely The Hammersmith Apollo, The Forum, The Garage, Heaven, G-A-Y Bar, G-A-Y Late, The Borderline and the Jazz Café in London, plus The Edinburgh Picture House, The Birmingham Institute, and Aberdeen’s Moshulu. Some of those venues will incorporate the HMV brand into their names.
The deal will see HMV pay MAMA Group around about £18.25 million (the exact figure will depend on the new company’s financial performance in 2009). The two business partners will have a 50% stake each in the new company, which will be primarily run day to day by MAMA, though both parties will be involved into looking at possible new venue acquisitions to expand the empire.
Confirming the deal, MAMA chiefs Adam Driscoll and Dean James told CMU: “We are delighted to be entering this joint venture arrangement with HMV, the UK’s leading music retailer. This is a landmark deal that alters the face of the live venue business in the UK. The engagement of artist and fan is the key driver of the music industry. That engagement is at its most evident at live events. Our venues are already key destinations for artists, promoters and fans. This new partnership between MAMA and HMV enables that live experience to be augmented by enabling us to offer the artist and fans a range of other opportunities to interact”.
HMV CEO Simon Fox added: “Music is very much part of our DNA, and by extending the HMV brand into the growing live music and entertainment market, our customers will be able as never before to access and experience music in all of its forms via HMV. Our joint venture with MAMA Group to own and operate key venues in the UK uniquely positions HMV to offer our customers full access to live music. We have also today announced the development of HMV tickets which will enable us to offer our customers tickets to events at our Mean Fiddler Group venues as well as a range of other events. In addition, HMV will now be able offer to our existing and new live customers exciting bundled product offers, comprised of music CDs, DVDs, MP3 downloads, games, and related merchandise”.
For those of you wondering how HMV can afford to buy 14 Zavvi stores and half of a major new live music company, well, they are planning an equity placement, which basically means they will sell some new shares in the company. Fox says they could have afforded to fund the two acquisitions using their overdraft facility but have decided creating and selling some new shares (which will equate to up to 5% of the business) is a better route. The CEO adds that the move has the support of the retailer’s bigger existing shareholders.
Back to Zavvi world, and with the HMV deal done the former Virgin Megastore chain now has 65 stores left in the UK and 6 in Ireland. Administrators Ernst & Young are apparently still confident they can sell some of that remaining network off as a going concern.
In other (good) news, The Fridge in Brixton is re-opening too! Always a positive to see more mid-sized music venues staying alive or being resurrected..
The management of The Fridge in Brixton has been taken back into the safe hands of owners Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington, and is currently being dusted down and spruced up as a major live music venue once again. The Fridge has been rewired, cleaned up and a massive new PA and lighting system has been installed, adding to the wonderful full size stage facilities, with direct loading from rear of venue, parking space, and three changing rooms with toilet and shower facility.
Over £150,000 has been spent on re-establishing the Fridge as a mainstream live music venue, capable of staging both intimate, 500 capacity club gigs (with the balcony closed) as well as 1400 capacity concerts and indoor festivals. Originally opened in 1913 as a cine-variety theatre, it retains all the original Edwardian Baroque /Art Deco friezes (highlighted in gold on black) and boasts fantastic acoustics and sightlines for gig goers – as old cinemas always do.
The Fridge in Brixton is one of only a handful of decent mid-size venues left in the capital; with demise of the Astoria, the only comparable venues (on a Tube line) remaining in operation are Koko in Camden and The Forum in Kentish Town. Co-incidentally, only the Fridge and Koko are fully independent and NOT part of any major chain of venues.
A wide range of live gigs and club nights are in the process of being organised for January 31st onwards, with various outside promoters already getting back on board and keen to put The Fridge back on to the national gig circuit map.
Having begun their careers as seminal live rock gig promoters (the duo established The Roxy, the world’s first punk club in Covent Garden London in 1976/77) Andrew, [ex-manager of the Damned, Generation X with Billy Idol, Adam Ant etc.] and Susan then opened the Fridge, shortly after the riots in Brixton in 1981.
The Fridge hosted the first gigs of acts such as the Pet Shop Boys, Jimmy Sommerville & Bronski Beat, Sade, Nick Cave with The Bad Seeds and Marc Almond, and later promoted everyone from The Sun Ra Arkestra (their last ever gig in the UK), to Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones, St Etienne, Roy Ayres, Gil Scott-Herron, Nico, (unfortunately also her last gig ever) and Take That. With Robbie.
The Fridge additionally won a reputation for world famous club nights such as Talkin’ Loud and Soul II Soul, and then drove the explosion of rave in the 90’s by becoming the home for long-running trance nights Escape from Samsara, Return to the Source, Pendragon and Logic.
Gay night Love Muscle pushed buttons and boundaries to such an extent it changed the direction of Gay night clubbing. Andrew and Susan also created the most successful Lesbian club in the World, first with Eves Revenge, followed by Venus Rising, regularly attracting over 1300 lesbian clubbers every month.
In January of 2004 Andrew and Susan let out the Fridge and took a long deserved break until November 3rd 2008, when they took back full management and ownership of the best club in London, located in Brixton, the capital of live music in South London.
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