Music retailing in Britain is one of the first casualties of the economic downturn.
London used to have an abundance of specialist record shops. Classical music, jazz, blues, folk, country and arcane rock albums all had their own dedicated outlets, staffed by knowledgeable enthusiasts who were keen to help.
Almost all of those vanished during the 1990s with the emergence of a duopoly of entertainment retailers: HMV and the Virgin Group, the latter becoming Zavvi after a 2007 management buyout.
With the collapse of Zavvi, which closed its last store on February 20, HMV has a virtual monopoly, which is dispiriting news for fans of 'roots' music who don't enjoy shopping on the internet.
Not that Zavvi paid much attention to albums that weren't going to appear on the pop charts, but it had taken over the flagship Tower Records store in Piccadilly where it inherited good jazz, blues and folk departments.
HMV's services to the jazz and blues fans, at least in its Oxford Street stores, are better than they are in Hong Kong, but still limited. I went shopping there for new releases by well-known artists that had been reviewed in recent issues of British jazz magazines, and they didn't have any of them.
The good news is you can still get old-fashioned service and real expertise at Ray's Jazz on the third floor of Foyle's bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Ray's used to be in Covent Garden. A few years ago the shop was about to go out of business, until it was offered space to open a store and jazz caf? on the first floor of Foyles.
