Last week, retail said goodbye to Dame Anita Roddick; this week it bade farewell to another of the great entrepreneurs of the late 20th century, as Sir Richard Branson sold Virgin Megastores.

Virgin was a retail idea of its time, capturing the anarchic buzz of the punk era and embodying it in a retail business. Like Roddick, Branson spotted a gap in the market and created the business to fill it.

Ironically, what Branson did in the 1970s was what Virgin and HMV are trying to do now: create an in-store experience that captures the excitement of the music scene. Interest in music has never been greater and both Virgin and HMV (page 28) have been trying to create new formats to reflect that.

There is real innovation going on in music retailing. Virgin’s Manchester store has a great live music space and even has its own MySpace page, a visit to which shows just how it has caught the imagination of the city’s music fans.

The problem is that the energy of Virgin in Manchester or HMV’s Merry Hill store, is never going to be replicated across a chain of more than 100 stores. Despite the enthusiasm of the staff, most of the stores in both chains feel staid and price-focused.

What they do have is powerful brands – or, in the case of Virgin, did have. It may have been diluted by Branson’s forays into everything from trains to cola, but Virgin has always had a cachet with music fans.

Virgin makes heavy losses and despite the efforts of its management, the tide has not been turned. Now it is owned by that same management team and will trade under an unknown new brand called Zavvi, it is hard to see how it will do any better.