A former classmate of the likes of Katie Melua and The Kooks’ Luke Pritchard at The Brit School, James Coughlan brings something a little bit different to his role with music retailer HMV.

“Attending somewhere like the Brit School gave me a unique perspective,” Coughlan, who is the new managing director of HMV Digital, says. “The artist’s mindset, so to speak.”
Putting his own musical ambitions behind him quickly, he became fascinated with the business side.
“You could say that I saw the digital wave on its way and I thought, ‘maybe it’s not a bad time to get the surfboard out and ride this’.”
Starting out at Mercury Records and going on to work for Vodafone, he has been operating in the digital entertainment sector for eight years. This summer, a resurgent HMV brought Coughlan onboard, hoping to use his experience to deliver a fresh digital offering. The fruits of many months of work are now with us, with the launch of HMV’s digital music store and smartphone app in October.
With plenty of competition already out there, Coughlan prefers to see HMV’s late entry into the digital market as a bonus.
“Some would say we’re last to the table, but I think it’s a blessing in disguise,” he says. “We can actually now take the best bits of what has come and somehow failed. We can do it right this time. Be the trusted voice. Which is what we are to our customers.”
Integrating all sides of the business is key: HMV plan to use their high street presence and reputation to bolster the online experience.
“HMV is a world-recognised, 80-plus year-old brand that everyone’s got a story about. For me, it was: how do we bring that back for a digital offering? We’ve got our bricks and mortar business to plug into and help us do that. Taking customers through the experience is going to be key.”
The HMV Digital experience allows customers to scan album covers with their smartphones, instantly getting audio previews of tracks and purchase options, as well as identifying music being played in-store. Whether that drags the masses away from iTunes remains to be seen.
Apple must be worried, however. Having approved the app for their store in September, they then instructed HMV to take it down.
“It’s important that our consumers feel that we can give them a service across all platforms,” Coughlan says, “because as soon as you start to alienate people and make them feel restricted, I think that’s where it can flounder.”
Luckily for Coughlan, a compromise has been reached with Apple that has seen the app return to the store. But iOS users will be unable to make direct download purchases from that platform.
“I’m very platform agnostic,” says Coughlan. “That’s why we’re launching a HTML 5 experience with hmv.ie – so that our Blackberry 10 customers, and our Windows customers, can experience the mp3 download service without having the dedicated app experience.”
His primary goal right now is to turn the conversation away from streaming – he promises HMV will offer artists far more support than the likes of Spotify – and back to ownership of the music you buy.
“I think streaming has dampened that for quite some time,” he observes. “It really has ticked a box for the record labels in that it’s arguably helped with piracy. But I would say of the people being accused of illegally downloading: they’re downloading, they’re not illegally streaming. So for me, it’s very much about putting a focus on ownership, on singles, on the experience we can bring to the high street. And that’s what we’ll be translating and rolling out as our 2014 digital roadmap.”