MAILBAG

Travelling for the love of music

I refer to the article Thanks For The Memories, HMV (Life, Oct 4).

It seems some of us have come full circle when it comes to buying music.

Back in the 1980s, I used to buy music cassettes, CDs and records from abroad. My taste is fairly eclectic and it was impossible to find what I liked locally then. To travel to London was to make a pilgrimage to worship at the altar of HMV.

With globalisation and the opening up of markets in the 1990s and noughties, buying my kind of music became easier as more music stores opened in Singapore, bringing in titles by more obscure artists and buying music from overseas took a back seat for me.

Buying music over the Internet, whether through downloads or streaming, somehow never held much appeal for me.

Now with the closure of so many music stores here, I am once again hard pressed to buy music locally and have returned with a vengeance to the happy hunting ground that is music stores overseas - whether in Beijing or Brisbane.

Will I miss HMV in Singapore? Well, maybe just a bit.


Lin Fangjie

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on October 10, 2015, with the headline Travelling for the love of music. Subscribe