HMV's Simon Fox - 1

I hope so - with our mix of products we do think we've got everyone's Christmas gift covered - and books with Waterstone's, of course. Christmas is disproportionately important for us, and the success or failure of our year is governed to a huge extent by what happens over Christmas.

As you'd expect it's something we plan day-by-day through those peak period very, very carefully. Last year we were hit by poor weather - snow - in those critical days up to Christmas, and we hope we're not going to get that again.

This Christmas I do think, though, that the games line-up does look strong - with Kinect, Move and the big software titles, it feels like there will be some good product in people's stockings.

Those were the stand-out releases, and they did fantastically well - but no, they weren't sufficient and our games, although we're been growing share, the Chart-Track stats showed games to be in decline last Christmas. So one or two stand-out titles aren't sufficient - you need people to be shopping across the range.

I agree with that entirely - I think having something every month, a reason to purchase, a reason to return, to keep playing games, keep them fresh and keep the interest high would be terrific. We don't create content, we are dependent upon it, and in an ideal world that's how we'd like to receive it, but it doesn't necessarily seem to come like that.

I think it has to be. Our customers only have so much time that they will dedicate to, let's call it entertainment. I only have to look at my kids to see that, while they're excellent multi-taskers, there are only so many things they can do at the same time.

Being on Facebook takes up a certain amount of time; playing games takes up time; and hopefully doing homework and other things takes up time... there is only a certain amount of time available. You could argue, and it is true to some degree, that you're playing on iPhone when you're on the move - and that is completely different.

I think it's more additive, yes. When you're at home, you've got the console option - but frankly I do think that's where Facebook can come in.

I think that free entertainment is taking money away from paid-for entertainment, and we see that with music, film and games. The fact is that you can get a great deal of entertainment for free - some of that will be illegal, and it is still the case that only one in every 20 music song downloads are legal. So 95 per cent of the digital music market is still illegal.