at 0:25 on October 18, 2008, EDT.
By Cassandra Szklarski, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - Record-store chain HMV is lashing out at a growing trend in the United States that has seen high-profile music acts like Guns N' Roses, AC/DC and the Eagles sign exclusive deals with big box retailers.

HMV bought a full-page advertisement in the music magazine Billboard to laud superstar acts for refusing to go along with similar arrangements in Canada and asks that musicians refuse any distribution offers that would cut out traditional retailers.

"To those of you who are considering retail exclusives in North America ... we ask that you 'Just Say No' when it comes to Canada," HMV Canada president Humphrey Kadaner says in the ad, structured as an open letter to musicians.

The ad was set to appear Saturday as Billboard's Oct. 25 issue was to hit streets. It cites AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, the Police and Bryan Adams as being some of the acts to refuse exclusive retail deals north of the border.

In the United States, AC/DC has an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart to distribute its long-awaited disc "Black Ice," due Oct. 28, while Guns N' Roses has a similar deal with Best Buy for its disc, "Chinese Democracy," due Nov. 23.

HMV says artists should stay away from such deals in Canada, where it says mass merchants don't dominate the retail landscape as much as they do in the United States.

But such arrangements are not entirely foreign here.

Up until June of this year, HMV Canada had banned Rolling Stones merchandise from its shelves for one year after the rockers struck an exclusive deal with Best Buy for a DVD release. That move came roughly four years after HMV banned the Stones for giving exclusive distribution rights to Best Buy for another DVD.

At the time, HMV said it was unfair for the Stones to lump Canada in with the U.S. market.

In 2005, Alanis Morissette drew the ire of HMV for striking an exclusive deal with Starbucks, which got exclusive rights to sell a special edition of her blockbuster disc, "Jagged Little Pill." HMV retaliated by pulling all of her albums from its shelves for the duration of the deal.


©The Canadian Press, 2008

HMV is dead. Music retail is dying a slow painful death and these are its last gasps...

don't die HMV, that downtown one is the only good one left here since they killed off Sam's! They're officially taking the record down too, for a school that claims to be a university! Don't get me wrong, I went there too but regret it so much now.

It's just the last embers of a dieing concept.

You can't expect anyone to take what they've deciphered to be less money, just to be fair to all music retailers (most of whom will be out of business soon due to much larger issues of ever decreasing demand).

Exclusivity certainly has its negative side, but it also often pays much better.

dont blame the artists at this point blame the labels who basically forced ALL music retailers out of the business instead of working with them. Im not going into the amount of money that labels charge stores for cds, but put it this way, a big box store like Best Buy loses close to 4 dollars for a new cd when it sells it for 9.99 so just do the math. Chains like goody,hmv,tower etc.. have been forced out because labels wont lower the new cd price that they charge the stores, in fact they have raised it $2 over the last 3 years and have expected the stores at the same time to cut the price to "compete". All i can say is WAVE GOODBYE to finding music in stores over the next few years, best buy has cut their stock 40% this year downsizing all music departments in all stores, Circuit City will be ELIMINATING music in many of its stores, Virgin will be closing down its NYC locations by the end of 2009 also, yes BOTH of them, their leases have already been eliminated.