Description
Sunrise Records and Entertainment, trading as HMV (for His Master's Voice, also known as The HMV Shop), is a British music and entertainment retailer, currently operating exclusively in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company on London's Oxford Street in 1921, and the HMV name was also used for television and radio sets manufactured from the 1930s onwards. The retail side of the business began to expand in the 1960s, and in 1998 was divested from EMI, the successor to the Gramophone Company, to form what would become HMV Group. HMV stands for His Master's Voice, the title of a painting by Francis Barraud of Nipper listening to a Phonograph cylinder, bought by the Gramophone Company in 1899. For advertising purposes this was changed to a wind-up gramophone, and eventually used simply as a silhouette. HMV owned the Waterstones bookshop chain from 1998 until 2011, and has owned the music retailer Fopp since August 2007. It purchased a number of former Zavvi stores in February 2009, and also branched into live music venue management that year by purchasing MAMA Group. It sold the group in December 2012.
On 15 January 2013, HMV Group plc entered administration; HMV Ireland declared receivership and all Irish stores were closed. The sale of HMV's Hong Kong and Singapore business to private equity firm Aid Partners was completed on 28 February 2013. On 5 April 2013, HMV was bought out of administration by Hilco UK for an estimated £50 million. HMV Group plc, which had been listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE Fledgling Index, was liquidated in July 2014. HMV Canada is a former subsidiary which was sold to Hilco by the HMV Group in 2011. HMV Canada went into receivership in 2017 after being sued by Huk 10 Ltd., a shell company owned by Hilco. On 28 December 2018, HMV announced that the company had once again fallen into administration.
On 5 February 2019, HMV was acquired by the Canadian company Sunrise Records, which had bought the leases for 70 former HMV Canada properties in an effort to continue operating them as record stores. Sunrise planned to emulate the growth strategies it had used in Canada, including leveraging the vinyl revival. On 12 October 2019, Sunrise Records opened The Vault in Birmingham, the largest HMV record store, and the largest entertainment store in Europe.
