His master's Voice remains loud and clear on the UK hight street.

Editorial Paul Williams

IT IS YEARS SINCE HMV could accurately be described as anything approaching a pure music retailer, but its encouraging set of trading figures for the opening third of 2009 has to be greeted as very positive news for the music industry.

The collapses of Zavvi and Woolworths can now be put into the context of having been huge setbacks for the industry, rather than disasters, given how album sales have held up reasonably well in the first four months of the year when they could have dropped disastrously on the back of the fallen retailers.

The two chains combined made up something like 20% of the market before they went out of business, but to date albums business - in unit terms anyway - has not fallen by anything like this. It is presently about 7% lower than it was at this time last year and a good chunk of that fall is down to the compilations sector enduring a particularly hard time. Factor that out and the drop is only around 4.5%, quite a stunning result when you consider the general trend was downwards anyway and the country is in the grip of the worst recession in decades. Compare the UK figures to other markets, such as the US where album sales are down more than 12% on the year, and that decline looks even less harmful.

It would be easy to conclude that without two of its rivals biting the dust HMV UK & Ireland's results for the 16 weeks to April 25 would not look anywhere near as rosy and, clearly, the retailer has capitalised on their misfortunes. For the sake of the music business, it is just as well it has cashed in because otherwise the year-on-year album sales comparisons would look a hell of a lot worse.

But the story behind the retailer's figures is ...