A Canadian entrepreneur has bought popular music shop HMV and saved a hundred of its stores, including Lincoln from closure.
Doug Putman, owner of Sunrise Records, fought off Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley by buying the company for an undisclosed fee.
Despite the payment, 27 of its stores are set to close across the country with 455 redundancies handed out due to high rent costs.
HMV has struggled in recent years due to online websites such as Amazon and Netflix as well as music streaming platforms.
A level of uncertainty remains for the store in Lincoln as it was placed on the list of the 130 shops at risk of closure earlier this year.
Lincoln High Street is currently home to 300 shops, including many of the nation’s favourite street names, such as Marks and Spencer’s, Boots and Clarks.
The city is also home to three different shopping centres, St Marks Shopping Centre, Cornhill Quarter Shopping Centre and Waterside.
Other music shops located in the city are worried for the future given the increasing popularity of online streaming platforms.
But an independent record shop in Lincoln says they think records and online streaming platforms such as Spotify can co-exist.
Jim Penistan, owner of Back To Mono record shop, said: “Spotify is good to check new artists out so it’s nice to listen to it first and you’ll know if you want it before you go into a shop and buy the album.
People still like to come into a record shop and have a physical product to look at since people can hold vinyl’s.”
Over the last 10 years, vinyl has become increasingly popular with music fans and holds a small percentage of the total sale of albums.
In 2017, over 4 million vinyl’s were sold along with reissues of Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
