Birmingham, like so many other º£½ÇÊÓƵ towns and cities, has had to wave goodbye to some big names from its high street over the past few years.
But record store chain HMV, which itself has closed two sites in the city, has decided it wants to tackle this issue head on.
Today, the company has opened the first ever 'HMV Vault', a new-look store it is calling an "experiential" concept where the customers' experience while in the shop is as important as the products they leave with.
Housed in the former Ikea unit in Dale End and claimed to be the largest store of its kind in Europe, it has a 4K room to show off Blu-ray and DVDs, more than 23,000 vinyl LPs and 77,000 CDs and a performance stage which will welcome artists several times a week, according to HMV's owner Doug Putman.
Birmingham's appeal as a retail destination is well founded, with investment in recent years in Grand Central and a major overhaul of high-end boutique mall the Mailbox.
But what brought HMV to the city to use Birmingham as a testbed to see whether this new 'Vault' concept could work elsewhere?
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Mr Putman said: "Birmingham is the º£½ÇÊÓƵ's second largest city with a really vibrant music and film culture and great customer demand for those products. Our overall goal here is to create a store that our customers absolutely love and draws more people into Birmingham from outside.
"This is a great pathway for us to see how good this can be and then ask 'Where else can we do something like this?'. You need to make retail more experiential and vibrant so this new store will have a very different feel to what people are used to in a normal HMV."
It was announced earlier this year that music entrepreneur Mr Putman was planning to buy out HMV after it had fallen into administration for the second time in six years in a deal which saved around 1,400 jobs and 100 stores.
The move followed a similar deal in 2017 when he acquired around 70 HMV stores in his native Canada through his company there Sunrise Records.
A glitzy launch event is planned today in Birmingham, welcoming One Direction's Liam Payne and 2012 X Factor winner James Arthur is due in town tomorrow.
Looking ahead, Mr Putman said success in Birmingham would determine whether the concept was rolled out to other º£½ÇÊÓƵ cities but warned this would not be judged solely by how much cash goes through the tills but feedback from Birmingham customers about their experience in the store.
Sales of CDs and DVDs have plummeted, with online streaming services and downloads proving such a popular model for today's tech-savvy consumers, so how does he see HMV's place in the market?
"Everything about us is counterintuitive when you look at what we've done with HMV - we're very supportive of the high street, trying to reinvent the brand and what it means," he told BusinessLive.
"You see a lot of articles saying 'It's over' but we just don't believe that so it may be counterintuitive to launch in Birmingham but we see a very vibrant culture in the city that sits very well with our identity.
"We think we can learn a lot by launching here which is going to help us go out into the broader market. Locations like Oxford Street in London are amazing but the rents in those types of places are at a point where it becomes almost impossible to succeed.
"Even if we did open another one of these stores in London, we would have to think a little differently and know that we're not going to be able to open on Oxford Street and be profitable."
While new investment into Birmingham's retail sector must always be welcomed, there is an elephant in the room in regards to HMV's choice of location for the Vault in the ground floor of a multi-storey car park.
Why did it choose to locate a new 25,000 sq ft shop in a unit which is set to be demolished as part of the Martineau Galleries project led by Hammerson, the listed property group which co-owns and manages Bullring and Grand Central?
Mr Putman is sanguine, rightly pointing out the site has been earmarked for demolition for many years and future plans could change anyway.
But he remained tight lipped about the length of lease he had signed, other than to say it was "multi year".
"Everybody has long-term plans in place and the thing about those long-term plans is they change," he said.
"We have a great opportunity, a good-sized lease term, we feel comfortable where it is and, if something changes down the road, we are prepared for that. At least it gives us a great proof of concept and allows us to figure out where we go next whatever that long-term vision is for that site."
Clearly a passionate advocate for the high street, he added: "Bricks and mortar retail is really special - it is something nobody really wants to see go away.
"There's something amazing about being able to go into a shop and actually have an experience and talk to staff about what you're listening to and reading. That sense of community is really quite important and something we stand for as a company.
"You see a lot of businesses shrink but we see that as an opportunity for us, we think retail has a long life and don't see it going away."
