When Piers Fawkes was in London a few weeks ago, he visited a few marketing agencies and the big buzz was that there was a huge pitch for advertising and online work for music retailer, HMV. Business is bad for HMV, but Piers' reaction was, "Why the hell are they talking to ad agencies? Will s an ad campaign or a cool site that will save them?"
The concept of the mega-music store in its current form comes from a pre-digital era: pile it high, twist the arms of record companies to pay for placement, limit stock. The digital music revolution came and went and HMVs and Virgin Megastores remained largely unchanged.