HMV

Decent selection, fair pricing and good customer service is how I would describe HMV’s flagship store in downtown Toronto. It appears over the past few years some sections have been taken over by knick-​nacks and other stuff taking away from what HMV once was. Now a days I find myself just browsing the discount section as I can generally find everything else from other sources for a better price.

The staff there helped me find everything I was looking for and suggested a movie based on my selections (insidious 2) which I just watched and absolutely loved. Previous to this visit I had not set foot in an HMV in close to 20 years (when music became suddenly free to everyone everywhere). They made such a great impression that I will be buying all my tv shows and movies there from now on.

Wide selection of DVDs, Blu Rays, & CDs. The selections are fairly priced given the circumstances of the tv/​movies/​music business industry dealing with pirating.
Their loyalty points card (HMV Pure points card) however is disappointing as points accumulated expire within a year unless you pay another $ 3 for another year’s membership to keep the points collected active. Points earned from purchases are not great either. I do not know any other retail loyalty program card that does this but I will definitely look elsewhere for CDs/​DVDs and «in your face» pop cultural t-​shirts from now on.

This is one of the very few HMV stores around. The one I used to go to in Sherway is now gone. I still buy CD’s for music because I want the CD. I can rip them to my iTunes and give the CD to my wife so she can play it on her CD player in the kitchen.
I don’t see many dedicated music/​DVD/​BD stores around anymore. Best Buy, Future Shop, Walmart and other stores that sell electronics and media still sell music but they just don’t always have the selection that dedicated stores like HMV have.

Had a truly terrible experience in this store today. After spending over $ 150 dollars the security alarm went off as I was exiting. The security guard asked me for the receipt which I showed him. He grilled me about who served me and didn’t believe me when I told him that I made my purchases on the second floor. He took my bag, disappeared in a back room returned and gave me the bag. No apology. Nothing. In the meantime somebody left the store triggered the alarm and they did nothing. It is despicable that a company would harass a paying customer when they obviously have a faulty security system. Truly appalling. It’s too bad I have to write this terrible review because two of the store staff were very friendly and helpful.

Security staff literally watch you like a hawk as if your gonna run off with a $ 5 DVD. I like staring them down just like they do to me.

They seem to have everything most people would ever want in the way of LPs, DVDs and popular music. I go here for the jazz room on the third floor.
The fact that jazz and classical get their own space is REALLY NICE.
As far as selection goes, this flagship store is tops. While they don’t have everything (nobody does), they do carry a lot – certainly most of the major titles from the major labels such as Blue Note. And with the 2/​$ 25 on many of these, you will not break the bank – it is only a little more than used. (if you can the CD used).
You are left to browse and decide between titles without any stress or pressure. The sales staff I have encountered up there have been friendly and helpful. (We CD sellers/​buyers are a dying breed and need to stick together!)
Highly recommended!

I haven’t been in this store since the 90’s. My has it changed. It’s not so music focused anymore and rather collectible and movie focused.
For what it is, it gets 3 stars. As a music store it’s worth half a star though.

A record store. How quaint. I found myself doing a ‘90s Day this Saturday. The World’s Biggest Bookstore, HMV, and Silver Snail. I was a regular haunt in all three of these places what seems like only a handful of year ago but was pointed out to me is, like, 20 years ago. 20 years. Golly. The HMV classical section convinced me it was high time to get a CD player. HMV has pared down. There used to be a side section that had video cassettes. Yeah, VCR casettes. Mmmmm… how I wish I picked up that V box set.
No one under the age of 55 buys CDs anymore and I rightly expect if music comes on CD to be free, a give away for buying Tampex. HMV over the years has managed to remake itself. Vinyl, CDs, small experimentation with DATs, VHS tapes, DVDs, iPod accessories, now high end funky headphones. It’s fun to pop in here and just trying to figure out how a music store survives in this day and age.
And don’t feel to sorry for the sorry state of such places. They were warned at the dawn of the MP3 age it was going to be downloads and streaming. Instead of figuring out how to take advantage of this new distribution channel they turned a blind eye to the technology and thought they could sue it out of existence. I, mean, it worked with DAT. Why not with a massive computer network no one really owns? Yeah. Sorry if I don’t cry much when this place becomes a condo.

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…

This place used to be so much fun when I actually bought CDs.
Those days of cutting into the plastic wrap and the joy of ogling inserts are long gone. Going to the listening section upstairs was a daily ritual of mine, but has now been replaced with the at-​my-​fingertips listening station of the Internet. As my HMV of olde has now become a glorified mainstream DVD store, I think of all the crackhead friends I made with every visit, and sigh a little sigh.
Now, the only time I actually head inside the store is if I’m in the area and need to check out cheap DVD sales. Mind you, this doesn’t happen often, and when it does, I do a once-​around the front sales section and then leave within a minute, never buying anything. I haven’t spent a dime in this store in a decade, nor can I remember the last time I saw someone walking around the area with an HMV plastic bag.
Who changed? You or me, HMV?

Whenever I’d be bussing back and forth from home to university, the Toronto bus station was the hub. Often I’d have time to kill between legs, so my layover on Bay Street usually included a stop over at HMV. It opened here in my early years of university and one of my friends introduced me to it. He described his previous visit there with wide-​eyes and drool hanging from his mouth stating «It’s like Christmas every day.»
Yes it is big, and it basically boils down to another big music and movie store, but it’s seldom the case that I walk out with only the thing I went in there for. A quick scan of what they’re pushing on sale will typically start filling your arms up. Next thing you know, you’ve got five or six new additions to whatever collection you’re trying to flush out and not even an hour has gone by. Not even ten minutes in some cases.
The selection is vast here, and between all of the departments, I can browse and gawk for hours at a time, much to the chagrin of anyone who’s waiting on me to leave and go somewhere. All I can say is this. If you like movies and music like I do… bring plastic.