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| - i have very mixed feelings about this store.
when i lived in toronto back in the 1990's, the sam the record man store on yonge street was THE music store in toronto, with a huge three-story warehouse of a store which had every conceivable recording you could buy. the store wasn't much to look at and the staff looked very rag-tag, but you knew that if you were looking for something very specific and out of the ordinary, chances were excellent that you could find it at sam's flagship store. i loved going from floor to floor leafing thru the all of the bins in the search for my new favourite songs...
then, when hmv moved in just down the block a few years later, i got the sense that this major multinational corporation was going to be bad for sam's. and it was: a few years later, sam's threw in the towel and canada lost a huge piece of it's music industry soul and history, because sam's championed canadian artists, musicians, and songwriters in a market which, back then, was ruled by multinationals hocking only foreign product. however, hmv did tout canadian artists as well, but those who followed the canadian music scene knew that hmv didn't have its roots in canadian music. compared to sam's, at least, for me, hmv is a very sterile experience.
over the years since sam's demise, i would come back to toronto for holidays (i moved back to the states after only a year) and stop in at the yonge street store. they did a respectable job at highliting canadian talent, but because i remember my experiences with sam's, music shopping just didn't feel the same. and now, with cd sales in rapid decline and downloading becoming the more preferable choice for buying music, the charm of going to hmv (or any record store for that matter), is really gone. one of the things i liked about hmv is that they'd open up a cd for you to listen to before you bought it, which saved me a ton of money in the end. but they don't carry as much merchandise as they used to, so there's less to browse thru and less new, undiscovered gems to find. in my case, i love folk and roots music. over the years, i've seen their folk and roots section dwindle from a whole row of spanning one side of the store to one small rack about 5 feet wide... but still, i come to this store to browse the aisles for new canadian music, because even as inventories keep shrinking, there's still new music to be discovered out there...
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