Folding magazines: Classic Rock & Metal Hammer

This would be grim news at any time, but just before Christmas amplifies the grimness: Team Rock have Team Rock, who publish Classic Rock and Metal Hammer magazines, have called in the administrators:

Thomas Campbell MacLennan, Alexander Iain Fraser and Jason Daniel Baker of FRP Advisory LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Team Rock Limited (“the Company”) on 19 December 2016.

The affairs, business and property of the Company are being managed by the Joint Administrators, who act as agents of the Company and without personal liability.

The Company is being managed on a care and maintenance basis only whilst a buyer for the assets is sought. Accordingly, the TeamRock website will be unavailable for the foreseeable future.

The administrators are assessing the position regarding publication of magazines. If you are a subscriber to the Company’s publications the administrators can be contacted via email at teamrock.subscribers@frpadvisory.com.

27 people in Scotland and 46 in London have lost their jobs. According to the BBC report, Team Rock had been losing money for quite a while; they're hopeful the brands will find a buyer - and so hopefully some of those staff will be rehired.

Gift vouchers expired

Not an unexpected move, but Deloitte have just announced that any HMV gift vouchers will not be honoured.

I can understand why they do this, but every time that announcement is made, it just destroys any lingering confidence and goodwill, doesn't it?

HMV limps on

You don't want to look, but you can't look away: HMV is continuing to limp on, with Deloitte apparently planning to find a buyer for the business.

It'd be a miracle if Deloitte could even find a business there, much less something to sell.

You'd have to wish the administrators luck - there are real people whose jobs hang in the balance now; people who aren't to blame for the decade of decline and hare-brained cinemas-and-youth-hangout schemes.

Equally, you'd struggle to see what administrators could do, starting from here. At least with Fopp, and MVC, there was always a chance that a rival chain might be interested in buying the rump. There's no rival chains any more.

There's a brand - if even dear old Zavvi lives on as a URL, that suggests there might be some room for HMV to hang about making a mockery of the chain's failure to develop a digital strategy. But there's few jobs in there, and - seriously - does anyone really go to Woolworths.co.uk or Littlewoods.co.uk and think it's the same business?

So: a little early for publishing the obituaries. But I doubt if anyone hasn't already started writing them.

Venuewatch: Fabric rips

Who knew there were any superclubs left still going? Apparently Fabric is still churning away, although now in administration and up for sale.

There's something exciting about the prospect of going to a nightclub being run by PriceWaterhosueCoopers, isn't there?

Both PWC and the club's management are both quite chipper about the prospects for someone taking on the whole thing and keeping it going. At least until the property market picks up and they can turn the whole thing into luxury flats, anyway.

Borders on the edge

Things keep getting glummer and glummer for the UK branches of Borders - the prospect of being rescued by WH Smiths was bad; the withdrawal of that prospect was worse; now, the 45 remaining stores have been placed into administration.

The administrators are sounding upbeat about finding buyers, but... I'm not sure the prospects are looking that good.

Trinity Street has gone

Thanks to the people who confirmed the earlier story about the closure of Trinity Street.

There's now some signs of the company going into administration, with Oasis and Razorlight losing their online stores and Orson and Ministry Of Sound websites vanishing altogether.

Kind of ironic that MOS, which once was attempting to turn itself into an ISP no longer even runs its own website services.

Trinity Street closes?

There's some internety-buzzing suggesting that Music marketeers Trinity Street have gone in to administration - despite a client list including Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Ministry Of Sound and Radios 1 and 2. There's nothing official anywhere on the web yet, but the Twitterverse seems convinced it went down on Friday.

Zavvi gift cards: the gift that just stops giving

There's some rumours circulating about strange goings-on with Zavvi gift vouchers; even talk of a mysterious secret account into which gift voucher sales were diverted.

As with most rumours, there's a slight element of truth: there was a protected account, but it wasn't secret:

As soon as the Directors became aware of the problems with EUK (27th November 2008), zavvi's main supplier, they sought to protect customer interests by lodging funds into a trust account. Until this time the Directors had no reason to believe there would be any issue regarding the sale of Gift Cards / Gift Vouchers from their stores. The sale of Gift Cards / Gift Vouchers was terminated on 4th December 2008. It is hoped that customers who purchased zavvi Gift Cards / Gift Vouchers from 27th November 2008 will receive a refund in respect of these Gift Cards / Gift Vouchers.

So, from the 27th of November, the money that people spent in good faith on Zavvi gift vouchers was being protected. The wider question, though, might be why - if the adminstrators were nervous enough to think there might be a problem on the 27th, it wasn't until the 4th of December that they actually stopped selling the vouchers at all? How is it "protecting customer interests" by selling a product they had good reason to suspect might be worthless?

Still, if you bought the vouchers in this period, at least you'll get your money back. Older Zavvi voucher holders will just have to join the queue with all the other unsecured creditors.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Zavvi endings?

Obviously, the timing of the collapse of Zavvi has been sped up by the failure of Woolworths' distribution, but it seems that all that has done is sped the inevitable, rather than brought destruction where there was only light. Even Zavvi's management team seem to tacitly accept that:

The group's founding partners Simon Douglas and Steve Peckham said: "We have done all that is possible to keep the business trading, but the problems encountered with EUK, and particularly its recent failure, have been too much for the business to cope with."

- that there was much else to cope with besides is certainly implied.

It's sad - who wouldn't rather buy music in a shop that at least once used to understand it rather than at Tesco? - and, for the staff, you'd have to hope they can salvage something in the New Year. But nobody who's shopped in a Zavvi since the ugly frontage first appeared on the High Street is going to be that surprised by this one.