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Requiem For The Record Store
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post has an article (minimal registration required) in which record stores ('Daddy, what's a record?') are preparing for their own demises. They attribute this to the big box stores (Best Buy, etc), online retailers (Amazon, etc) and, you guessed it, downloading, both illegal and legal. 'The fat lady is warming up, but she's not exactly singing,' says one retailer, knowing that he still has a few more years until his business is totally moribund." Get it while it's hot -- soon, the Washington Post is switching to a more annoying registration system.
Requiem for the Record Store
Downloaders and Discounters Are Driving Out Music Retailers
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A01
With a total stock of more than 85,000 albums, Manifest Discs & Tapes was a music lover's mecca in the North and South Carolina towns where it operated. And despite an industry-wide downturn in CD sales in recent years, all five Manifest stores were turning a decent profit right up until the end of 2003.
So there was shock all around when chain owner Carl Singmaster announced in late December that Manifest would close all locations and lay off all 100 of its employees. There were still plenty of consumers eager to browse the bins, Singmaster explained, but his company's prospects looked bleak and were getting bleaker.
"I felt like I needed to take this opportunity to exit," Singmaster said in a telephone interview. "Indies in the smaller markets face a very risky environment."
It's not just the indies, and it's not just the smaller markets. On Thursday the parent company of Tower Records, which has four stores in the Washington area and a few dozen more in major cities nationwide, was on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to news reports, having failed to find a suitable buyer. In September, the bankrupt Wherehouse Entertainment chain was acquired by a company that promptly said it would close 35 under-performing stores. Mall chains such as Sam Goody are hurting, too.
As pop's superstars strut down the red carpet in Los Angeles tomorrow night for the Grammy Awards, there's something close to panic in the retail trenches of the music business. The record store is in serious trouble. Sales have been hammered by Internet piracy as well as competition from big-box retailers, such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart, which are two of the nation's leading music vendors. Online CD stores, such as Amazon.com, are gaining momentum, too -- 3 percent of the market in the most recent survey by the Recording Industry Association of America, up from zero eight years ago.
Now a new threat looms. The market for legally downloadable music is tiny today, but the success of Apple's iTunes online music store and the rush of rival services to the marketplace is expected to gobble up an ever-larger share of the pop music pie. A recent study by Forrester Research, which examines technology trends, predicts that in five years fully one-third of all music will be delivered through modems, and the CD itself will be passe, if not obsolete, in the years after. This isn't necessarily bad news for the record labels, but it could be lethal for brick-and-mortar stores.
"I tell retailers they need to get out of the plastic business," said Josh Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, titled "From Discs to Downloads." "Two-thirds of the people who currently download say that when it comes to music, it isn't important to them to hold a physical object. They're done with the CD. They just care about the songs."
If that's true, the album is doomed and the industry is headed back to its roots in the '40s and '50s, when the single was the most popular format. It's already moving that way. Last week, the punk trio Green Day released a cover of the rock classic "I Fought the Law" through a promotion advertised on the Super Bowl and available exclusively on iTunes. That's a peek at the future: Hear the song one minute, own it the next.
That's a transaction that doesn't require a record store, of course. As a precedent, consider the airline ticket. Thanks to online travel sites and the advent of ticketless travel, millions of flyers no longer think of tickets as physical objects that must be printed and brought to the airport. And that's been brutal for travel agencies: in the past three years, 30 percent of them have closed, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which keeps tabs on the industry.
Plenty of stores like Manifest have surrendered, while others believe the end
I think it's pretty good that non-digital formats are dying out, but we have to worry about hyper-DRM and the ever-annoying DMCA. This will annoy everyone and make some switch to P2P. In the end though, when KaZaA is shut down, we'll still have IRC, so I'm not worried.
On
I haven't been to my local videostore in over 8 months. Netflix is where I go to get my rentals.
These types of businesses will have to get creative to stay in business. Perhaps supplement their rental business with other types of goods. There is a cool video rental place in the East Village that shares space with a pizzeria, theatre and screening room. Two Boots. Check it out.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
I went to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square last week, stomping through a blizzard, to browse their stacks and pick their brains, for the best collection containing an obscure Quincy Jones single. Miles of aisles, and some few and far between pimply teenagers with a 6 week "pop" memory window, and a numb touchscreen kiosk with "all the answers". By the time I navigated their catalog according to their peculiar pigeonhole system, it offered me the same unavailable compilation in two apparently different ways. They should turn the store into a theme park for their cobranded culture droppings, and drop the pretense of retailing music.
--
make install -not war
I'm crying my eyes out. If those selling music in any form refuse to work *with* their customers (not consumers), they deserve to die out.
And sob.
It surprised me to hear that piracy is considered responsible for the demise of classical music stores as well. I find it hard to believe that hardcore Bach-lovers are swapping the latest tracks on Kazaa...
I'll always be buying physical media whenever it's available, record shops or not. If I'm buying digital stuff, it's just a keystroke or bankruptcy away from being lost forever. With real stuff, it's much harder to destroy, can be easily backed up, and the format won't go out of style for quite a while.
Now, the knowledgeable people used to be more important, because we didn't have online sources of knowledge. Who wants to trek down to ask Record Story Guy about that obscure album when you can sit in front of your computer and make a post on some web site to the world? Sure, there are some people who want the record store experience, but I highly doubt that it's a significant number.
There's just no reason for them to exist anymore, unless they can somehow sell for less.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Bitching about annoying registration requirements: Good idea
Opening slashdot to charges of copyright infringement by reposting an entire piece of copyrighted material here: Bad idea
But those that either appeal to specific hard-to-find genres (like places that have a lot of used stuff and let you trade in and so forth) and those that have diversified beyond recordings (like Borders) will still be around for awhile, I think. Even with the internet, I still like going to Borders and hanging out, browsing some books and previewing some cds and generally shopping around. And the used places are nice too, as you can often encounter things that you probably wouldn't find anywhere else.
time to start a "no more" washington post articles! a pre-emptive strike (or is that a decapitation strike?)
i read a similar article yesterday in Newsday about Tower Records filing for bankruptcy
The article though takes a somewhat different approach stating that competition from Wal-mart and Best Buy and their lower priced CDs is causing Tower's bankruptcy..
If they actually start lowering CD prices to, say, $6 or so for an album.. i'll buy..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
I have downloaded music for years, but all that has done is vastly widen my musical taste. Now I want albums from labels that the monkies in virgin and hmv haven't even heard of! So places like amazon are always going to win with a wider range. All I want now is for them to stop the stupid price fixing restrictions CDwow and i will be happy.
joe
- meta language used, please apply your own spelling and gramma
I live my an independent music store that recently shut down due to a Best Buy open up right next door. While the Best Buy is able to offer cheaper prices and more variety, they lack the human interaction I found at my local recordstore. I knew many of the sales associates there and valued their opinion as to what music to buy. They always knew the newest indie rock band to recommend to me, while at Best Buy the only thing recommended to me is Britney Spears, crappy nu-metal, or some talentless mainstream musician.
Just because it didn't work for you, doesn't mean the record store experience doesn't work. Hundreds of thousands of people are happy with them. Maybe you should think about this before you open your big, over-condemning mouth again.
I know why the stores are at their demise versus online venues... The retail clerks...
I shop online because I've been to the stores and the retail clerks all seem to be essentially worthless.
The quality of knowledge is decreasing exponentially in these huge mega stores upon the retail clerks... or at least it seems more often than not.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Records are still worth keeping, if the following instance works out OK -- Does anyone know whether you go buy some cheap vinyl version of an album that it's ok to download the mp3 version since you would technically own an original copy?
If this is a realistic thing, vinyl could sell like hotcakes if the shops advertised the fact. Or garage sales.
thehomeland(.org)
Video stores will stick around becuase sometimes people just need a movie to watch. I was out to dinner with friends last night and somone was talking about the evining with kevin smith special, and we were like, what the hell, lets go rent it. Thats what rental places will cater to, spur of the moment type things. Netflix is nice, but if you dont know what you want in advance it cant beat wandering the ailes trying to decide on a movie for that nite. Until VOD services get better(speed, selection and widespread) there will still be a blockbuster on the corner. Most popular movies it would be easy enough to download it p2p and output it to my tv, but even with my high speed cable connection it still takes at least 40 minutes to download a 700mb divx dvd rip, its a lot quicker to walk over to blockbuster.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
As someone who has gone to many conventions and been to stores of another seemingly dying art form -- comic books -- I have to say, there may be fewer of them but I doubt record stores will completely die out. There will always be enough collectors and people into obscure or older media to sustain at least one or two decent stores for cities. I've noticed the best ones are usually the stores that doen't just specialize in one thing, also. The store I used to go to for imports impossible to find almost anywhere else also carried rare and vintage t-shirts, concert posters, tapes, CDs, vinyl -- you name it. Comics in their traditional form are dying out, they've been replaced by tradepaperbacks, mostly... but there is enough of an audience to still sustain them for now.
Plus to the purist and somewhere where many customers are regulars, it's hard to beat a real person to walk you around and recommend new music based on everything else you've bought in the past. I know Amazon tries, but just like I believe ebooks will never replace real books, the atmosphere just isn't there. The only CDs I've bought in the last five or six years have all been used, from used CD/record stores. I've only started ordering everything online since I lost my car. That's my $.02.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
"The fat lady is warming up, but she's not exactly singing..."
I need to know if there is a photo before I look at the article.
Why would anyone have need to go near a record store for the past 3 years. Even my mom gets music online. Stores that essentially sell information are dead as dinosaurs. No big loss.
I actually bought a CD! The last time THAT happened was back when Sehnsucht came out, in 1999. Of course, since it was on an independent label, they had to order it, but I didn't pay shipping, even though I had to wait a week. That's the benefit of buying in a store.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
I went "legit" middle of last year and deleted all the music I had downloaded off the internet(somewhere around 20GBs of tunes). Since then, I've been buying up all the songs that I really thought were worth it to have. I'm in high school at the moment and not too large a budget, however, I've been able to find everything I want at none too expensive prices. I love the small record shops, there's this store in the village calle "heartbeat" and their prices are phenomenal in addition to having some really eclectic tunes. I'm still going to continue to buy albums, I am pure mac, however, I don't use the iTMS. The CD itself is more important, and it's only a few bucks more most of the time.
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
If the record stores really want to stay in business, then why don't they do the obvious?
Install a very high speed telecom line and a bank of DVD/CDRW burners. When someone wants the latest album by Shithead (pronounced Shee - thay - hahd; an ancient Celtic term meaning brave and worthy) then they would go to the record store and buy a CD-R or DVD that is burned from the copy that is storage in the store's hard disk RAID array. (Or they would download the album from the record company (and store it on their in-house hard disk RAID bank if it wasn't there already).
The fact is, record stores are going out of business because, they are TOO STUPID to adapt to even simple changes in the business environment.
I feel bad for the record stores. I really do. They've been screwed by the labels.
The average, mid-sized record store has been reduced to basic meaninglessness. Forget downloading. The labels focus on less megahits as opposed to a more evenhanded approach to music has left them in a pickle.
The average listerner to music only wants the latest big hits. Because of this, the big box stores can use their size advantage and price them right out of the market. As well, they don't need to dedicate much floor space to this at all.
Locally, there is not a single store dedicated to new music. Not one. One record store closed, and the other sells more DVDs than CDs, and has more store space dedicated to it. CDs are reduced to one wall and one row.
I don't think the humble record should die, and I don't think it will. Many will go, but the good ones will stay. The problem, as I see it, is that most record stores have become completely homogenized. They all play crappy R&B music (the new type, not real R&B), have generic attendants, and want to sell you DVDs, computer games, and all sorts of crap.
:-)
Back in the 60's it wasn't uncommon for people to hang out at the record store, buy records, lay around on beanbags checking out the latest stuff, and walk out with a bag of records at the end of the day. It was also quite common for bands (big and small) to play at record stores. Why can't this happen more these days?
Yeah, okay, I'm yearning for the record stores in films like High Fidelity, and to a lesser extent, Empire Records
want2cyber?
Come out, Anonymous troll Coward, and display your bizarre vendetta. Just because you are among many who are satisfied with the inadequacy of retail, doesn't mean I should accept it. Why are you afraid of the future? Or did I just make you see yourself as a fool in some other post, where you typed before you engaged your brain? Fragile Anonymous Coward, too afraid to even use a user ID, let alone add something useful to the discussion, for fear of being so wrong once again. I'd be sorry I hurt your feelings, if you acted like a person. Instead, you attempt to silence me with childish epithets like "over-condemning"? Try some substance, and I'll be willing to school you again. Or come correct, and join the adults in articulating a better way to live.
--
make install -not war
Rasputin Music has a pretty good record collection...but I guess it's a lot easier to find real record stores in the SF Bay area. I also get vinyl from eBay and random stuff at thrift stores.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Maybe if the poor, victimized record stores (e.g. Virgin, Warehouse, et.al) would stop charging $17.99 for a CD, they wouldn't have this problem.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
I'm just glad it's getting easier and cheaper to support artists by getting rid of the old-economy middlemen, and without having to do it through buying a token physical CD (or doing the concert thing, which ain't my thing).
--
Power to the Peaceful
CD's are being stocked less and less in many music shops, while things like DVDs, and Music/Movie related trinkets are increasingly common.
The only reason I can think of for this, is you can't pirate a Futurama doll online, and Movie rips online are either too large, or of unacceptable quality to the average potential downloader.
It is not profitable for a retailer to stock/wherehouse any quantity of an item when your customer can get it online, far more conveniently, for free or at 99 cents a tune.
Granted, by creating a system whereby only about 20 bands/40 songs get any serious airplay in any given month, the recording industry has consolidated much of it's advertising/production budget in a very small breadbasket.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
One of the processes about listening to music is finding the music in the first place. Sure the songs on the radio, everyone record store clerk should know those. But, finding other stuff can be harder.
The iTunes music store, even if you never buy from them, is a great way to FIND music. Who ever is doing the iTunes essentials section, is doing a great job. And now that they are stocking up with independent music, its a great way to find that too. .
Nice to know slashdot is not as pro-piracy as it has been in the past. "The Man" isn't an unknown Goliath entity. It's your neighbour, your family member, your friend; everyone who has anything to do with the music industry. (ditto for movies)
That wasn't "interesting" at all. Basically the parent poster said:
Oh boo hoo. I went to a store and had to search and search through the popular stuff that they sell everyday! I picked the brains of the employees, and *gasp* they weren't music historians, but knew quite a bit about the current offerings. How dare they!
I finally found what I was looking for, twice even, but they didn't have this obscure song by an unpopular artist in stock right away! What do they think they're in business for? To sell popular music to people who like popular music?!
As I passed the posters, t-shirts, books, magazines, and DVD's on my way out of the store, I thought, "If they're not going to sell the music I like, they should just stop pretending to sell music and focus on selling pop culture."
Hey buddy, the term is "target audience" and sorry, but you're not in it.
This is yet another example of why you can't trust newspapers or any "general interest" journalists (I'm a Mac owner, so I keep up with Apple very closely). As a fellow science fiction writer (I think it was S. M. Striling) said on a panel: "You know all the errors you spot when a newspaper does an article on a subject you're an expert on? Well, all the other articles are just as inacurate, you just don't know it."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
I refues to pay for an entire album (10-16 tracks?) when only 3 are listenable. Maybe if the record industry quit pushing out garbage people would buy, oh and lowered the price of cd's a little, they've been nearly the same price for 10 years now (at least where i live, new cd's sell for around $15 CAN). You can now buy a dvd player for les than $50, portable cd players are 1/4 the price and play mp3's as well, why has music "kept" it's value. The cost to produce cd's has gone down and yet the cd's haven't. I still do buy a cd now and then, when I want to support the group, and they have an album that i find to be entirely listenable (more recent was either queens of the stone age or Red Hot chilli peppers). If I want to hear the newest pop song, i'll download it, and when i'm tired of it i'll delte it, no messy storage of Cd's, no wasted money.
Let's face it. People do not want to through their money away, especially on something they could get for free.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
I don't understand why more smaller stores
don't offer internet capabilities in their stores specifically for research. Talking about the 'knowledgeable record store employees' is fine in some stores, but most don't have people who know *everything*. I worked in a music store, and hated not having answers to people, especially when I knew I could find the answers at home via newsgroups. *NOW* it's even easier to find most info, but I don't see web connections in stores (big OR small). It would be *so* easy to put them in and throw up a $50/month DSL connection to wire 3-4 PCs for customer/employee research.
*SAME* idea - but why don't video stores have web connections to IMDB. If any of you reading this *have* that, you're lucky. Not one video store around here (big chain or indy) *has* that available. I certainly don't expect the 2-3 employees at a blockbuster to know the ins and outs of all my movie questions, but if I could get those questions answered, I'd likely rent more at that moment (assuming they *had* what I had researched).
Also, by having in store PCs, you could log what people are searching for, and perhaps actually *stock* what people are after. 90% of people who came into our stores were 'just looking' (and that's my line now too) but if I could do a bit of research, I'd likely buy more at the stores). Yeah, wireless web/PDA/cellphones will make that happen one day (right - sure!) but *for now* fight the decline of music and video retailing by making it easier for people to do quick research. They'll buy more.
creation science book
I realize it wasn't just talking about "record stores". My bad.
Rasputin still rocks though.
I belong to the ______ generation.
The big kicker is that they require an email address. This means they're going to not activate the account, until you click/paste a link that's only available by providing a real email address that you have access to. Makes it more difficult to create cypherpunk/cypherpunk accounts[1]. Not impossible, just more difficult.
[1] Some sites got wise to the cypherpunk/cypherpunk combo a few years back and started deleting them. In such cases, ciferpunk is oftentimes there.
>> Washington Post is switching to a more
:(
>> annoying registration system.
"We do look at the data to see how many 90210 [Zip codes] are in there, but by and large we feel pretty confident that it's very good information,"
I thought I was the only one who used 90210
Marshall said the company and advertisers would not send messages to the e-mail addresses unless the user gave permission to do so during the registration process. However, the company is not promising not to send mail to the home addresses, he said.
There are a couple of old-as-the-routers methods to passively fight these intrusive registration system like, "Don't read their content" or "Make up a fake person" or "Use the google back-door." But the Washington Post is providing us with a great way to actively fight back here.
Everyone who registers for a pseudonymous account should be sure to use a zip code in the DC area and then pick a real home address in a more expensive part of town. But, make your pseudonym offensive.
Simply calling yourself firstname fuck lastname you probably won't work because that is easy to filter for. Instead, be creative with the spelling and the spacing for example, "C'King, AssFu" or "Suk-My Long-Dong." When they start using these addresses for their own promotion or selling them as a mailing-list, there are going to be some pissed-off, humorless rich white folk. All it will take is a lawsuit or two and the Post will see the error of their ways.
Of course they may consider canceling all free access, but that knife cuts both ways and they've got a lot of competitors who are happy enough that they don't feel the need to squeeze every last penny out of the system.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's a pretty basic answer. When the labels finally do this, the few retail outlets left will have new posters and merchandise pushed to them to promote this 'new wave of the future' technology. By then, it'll be too late for most of the retail stores - they'll be closed.
creation science book
Now apply that concept to retail music stores.
You go in to the music store, go to the Kiosk, listen to samples from every available album currently in prin, all the while selecting a song here or there that you may want to buy. Did you bring your own memory card? If not that's ok, the guy behind the counter will sell you a CD, or DVD, or whatever (high quality stuff, of course) and you put it in the Kiosk, enter your credit card, decide what format you want (wave, lossless, mp3, ogg, etc) and presto! You now have a collection of music that YOU want, on the media you specify.
It seems so simple and obvious to me. I allows you to do it at the mall with your friends if ya like that part of shopping. It provides a very fast download point to those that are on dial-up, and everyone wins!
Oh it's you again. You stupid shit. Not really worth conversing with you.
Enough said.
Personally, I've definitely been buying a heck of a lot more music in the last few years, since P2P became a big part of my life. I'm exposed to a lot more music now, so the amount of music that I end up deciding I really love is much greater, and if I really love something I want to own it. (Let's skip the list of reasons behind this, it's an argument I'm sure most of you are pretty darn familiar with.)
But it's also quite true that I've been buying stuff at record stores much less often. In fact, I remember on occasion when I was at a Tower Records and suddenly heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar song on the store's PA... Walked over to the section of the store that included that artist's music and found out she had a new album out... And immediately drove home to download it.
Then a few months later bought it, but not at Tower Records, at Microcenter, a computer store that also has a small section of CD's.
Why? Because Tower Records wanted almost $20 for the CD, but Microcenter wanted about $13. And because Tower Records had a scary goth kid with far too many piercings working the cash register.
Stores like Tower Records apparently base their business model on getting teenage kids with subpaar intelligence and rich parents to cough up a nice amount of daddy's money in order to get products that they could be getting for much cheaper at a regular store. Unfortunately for them, it's those same teenage kids who are also most likely to download a bunch of tracks off of KaZaA and not even notice, let alone care, that they've got a ton of skips, that they were downsampled to 32 KHz and encoded at 96 kbits/sec, that they've apparently been re-encoded several times and now have a ton of artifacts and that it's been ages since they've heard an actual album in its entirety.
It's a simple principle, really. These kids don't think and don't care, and in the past that's meant that they didn't see how the record stores were putting one over on them... But now it means that they also don't see the added value that record stores add over KaZaA downloads.
And it appears that, like the RIAA itself, these record stores would prefer to close down and blame others than to try to rethink their business model.
I used to love Tower Records. Tower and the Virgin Megastore. Because I thought of them as the two record stores that are most likely to have the sort of weirder, more eccentric music I listen to. There was a "Tower Alternative" store in a neighboring city that I used to go to a lot, which was a Tower store that specialized in weirder music.
Now that's pointless, though... Even the weirder stuff can be found online easily, and I can shop around for the best prices on it easily. If record stores want my continued business, they need to:
But there isn't a chance in hell they'd be willing to make such changes, I gather. It'd be far too logical and well thought out.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
Its a sad thing that so many businesses are filing for chapter 11 nowadays. Its not even just music people download but movies, software, and whole bunch of other crap illegally. If you go on a peer to peer network like gnutella that limewire uses and search for any movie most likely you will find and there you go there is a free $20.00 movie, at the click of a mouse button. There is no way that people will be able to stop it unless they ban computers, because who is going to give away burned cd albums for free on the street. The reason people allow others to download their music is because it doesn't cost either party anything and because if everyone doesn't share then there will be nothing to download. But if you show good will by allowing others to download from you then maybe that person will others to download from them and so on and so forth, creating a chain reaction which will eventually destroy many markets not just the record stores but video rental stores and software stores around the world
MonkeysKickAss
One of the troubled chains mentioned in the article tried to do exactly that. But they were stymied by the record companies.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I suppose they should ignore the thousands of customers who don't have tastes as elite as yours and found what they were looking for? If actually talking to the staff wasn't beneath you, they would have at least made a good-faith effort to help you find it (at least, that's my experience in that store).
As long as there are human DJs, there will always be a place for vinyl records and hence record stores that sell them. It seems to be a little known fact that most new releases are released on vinyl just for that purpose.
Washington post is making a huge blunder. At least w/ NYT you can lie about your email address and still get in, there's no verification.
I used to work for a HUGE (still HUGE) online news site, and we tried requiring registration and didn't let people in without verifying their email address first. Our ad revenue went down the toilet for a month. People gave up trying to go to the site and went other places to find their news. We lost about 90% of our page views overnight, and were swamped with angry emails.
Eventually, we had to remove the requirement of registering before you could read the site. It was only required for things that needed it, like your account where you could set up news alerts and other such things.
I wonder how much research WP's marketing dept actually did on this. If I were them, I'd be looking for another job right now, because there is going to be some major backlash from the execs after this one.
Some of the best places to buy music online are:
DE:
Unisex
UK:
Penny Black Music
US:
Darla
Indiepages
Parasol
Revolver/Midhaven
Tonevendor
Twee Kitten (they also have dvds and give discounts on larger orders)
For some more useful links (bands, labels etc) check here or here.
Also, the best records shops are Amoeba and Sonic Boom.
It's sad to see how closed the record industry is to innovation. As the article points out, unreasonable restrictions are being put on retailers. However, once again it is being shown that not all retailers are treated equally.
Remember how mp3.com allowed you to listen to albums that you owned? Apparently RIAA isn't concerned about that kind of thing anymore because they allow Virgin to have Mega-Play (see the article). The issue at stake in the mp3.com suits was that mp3.com didn't have a separate physical medium for every customer... What about Virgin?!
And then there are the issues of quality and DRM. Personally, I like my music as 320kbps mp3s that I can put on my mp3 player, burn to CD, etc. Consequently, I'm limited to ripping it off CDs.
Incidentally, my CD purchases have exploded since I started downloading music. I download to check it out, and then get the CD. Fortunately, some artists are better than others and provide more songs per CD.
Being in Germany, I'm stuck with exorbitant prices (e.g., the album Down From The Mountain which I purchased for $15 at Walmart in the US costs 32.99 Euros/~$40 over here). So I consider the purchases that I make. But as I mentioned, I still purchase at least 1 CD per month for myself - plus any I give as gifts. Just give me my music as I like it! I'm happy to pay!
But what about the out-of-print music that the labels are sitting on? I can't believe that the studios have problems with people downloading _those_! There are a number of CDs that I've looked for and that I would have been more than happy to purchase, but they are no longer being sold.
Janis Ian wrote an interesting article that generated a lot of feedback. She proposed that the labels should charge $0.25 per song for download of out of print songs, and put their whole backlog of songs online. That would be a windfall for them. I'm quite sure that that would more than make up for the downturn in record sales. However, it seems that RIAA has forgotten that the whole economy went south. So it's not just downloading that's breaking them, but they could easily turn it to their favor.
There are many ways to keep independent record stores as a part of commercial Americana. Consider independent bookstores. In the Boston (and I think New Orleans, although I haven't lived there for a few years) are, independent bookstores like brooklinebooksmith are members of booksense. A kind of federation of independent booksellers. Many of these stores are right next to a barnes and noble. (Not that I have anything against the library like stacks of books they have available. ) But there is something about a "local" bookstore (read: record shop) that gets me all warm and fuzzy (maybe the free drinks when they have guest authors come visit). But, the local record store is not going extinct, it just needs to re-evaluate its strengths and adapt accordingly. And local merchants have a lot of strengths.
becomes:
Hopefully the new registration mechanism will still allow this, otherwise I might miss whatever articles aren't reposted on slashdot...
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500 email:georgebrush@whitehouse.com
etc. should be fun from a number of different angles
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Lost Harmony House last year. This actually illustrates one of the problems the industry is having. The big stores only carry the really popular stuff, while the stores that focused on music had a wider selection, but are now going away. Everyone is focusing on the 40% of the market that makes 80% of the money, and the rest is drying up due to neglect. This means 20% less money now, and 60% fewer people interested in music (offered by RIAA) later. My ratios are completely fabricated on the fly of course, but I'm trying to illustrate the problem of ignoring everything but the biggest sellers.
A few weeks back the Green Bay Press Gazette had an article about a small music store (The Exclusive Company) in Green Bay (and a few other locations throughout Wisconsin) that are still doing fairly well and have no plans of stopping now. Small music stores can survive, they just have to find their market and stick with it.
Mom and Pop stores are never going to beat Walmart and Bestbuy trying to sell the latest Britney Spears and Outkast CDs because there is no way they will be able to compete with the volume discounts those stores receive, and on the "loss leader" practice of business. However, if they can make a name for themselves in certain areas like The Exclusive Company has, then they will do just fine.
I have moved out of the hell that is Green Bay to the east coast, but I still do 80% of my music shopping there, because I know that there is a very good chance they will have what I want in stock, and I know I can ask Tom for reccomendations on new bands which I may not know and walk out of the store with a damn fine CD I have never heard of. Small record shops will live and die on the people who run them and what they stock, not by trying to beat the giants on price.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Stripped of your hyperbole, you got most of my experience right, although Qunicy Jones is actually one of the most popular artists ever, both in his own right and "beind the music" of most R&B hits of the past 40 years. Except for the part where the song wasn't on offer "right away" - there was no way to even backorder it, even when I had mastered their labyrinthine kiosk. The kids were nice enough, but didn't actually seem to know about the products they were selling off the shelves, evidenced by some wild goose chases to empty slots as tangential sales opportunites surfaced when Quincy Jones was unavailable. Their alphabet skills were about B- as we navigated the shelves, but their main skills seemed to be willingness to wear the uniform for minimum wage. I guess that's a benefit that music websites can't provide.
You're a funny person to read Slashdot, if you can't see the vast inferiority of my representative experience compared with either Internet music shopping, or "mom & pop & punk" music stores, where shopping is actually a social experience. Maybe you just read Slashdot to snipe at people who articulate a different view from yours. Maybe you like the pablum manufactured to satisfy your manufactured taste for a week. I hope you're happy with that "target" on your head. I prefer to be the hunter, rather than the hunted. But I savor my captured quarry for a while, I don't just kill and stuff it to show off how "cool" I am.
--
make install -not war
"Business at one of those [local stores], in Clemson, S.C., dried up almost overnight when the university there installed broadband Internet connections in dorms, Singmaster says." yup, had absolutely nutt'n ta do wit'it, nope, unhuh...
Isn't retail like survival of the fittest anyway? Stores that can't please a customer won't be shopped at, and methods of delivery that are successful will flourish. So let them die out. They can either upgrade or disintegrate, and the choice is theirs.
Maybe in the US records are dying. In the UK, where the market is saturated by dance music, you can't move for records.
They aren't cheap either. 1 Single can cost up to 5 that's a lot of money considering the entire album is 12!
I'm not the AC you replied to - I'm another one - but I gotta say that you rub me the wrong way for some reason. You come across as an arrogant asshole in your wordage. I bet you're a jew, too.
no really, i cannot tell...
i was wondering about this..... Apple splits the 9950/50 right? and they pay their expenses out of that?
.00179% ..... that's why many stores have a minimum purchase for credit cards, the store loses that much over a cash sale but it leads to more sales, and i guess less physical cash to handle. is it me or does that leave less than 19 cents a song for Apple to squeeze profits from? maybe Apple has a better deal with the charges.
in addition to bandwith, servers, humans, bla..... what about the fees taken by the people handling the credit card purchase?
Apple's iTMS also allows the 1 Click shopping as well as adding purchases to a cart and checking out. i bought 2 songs about 2 minutes apart using 1Click (not thinking about it) but the 2 charges showed up on my credit card as 2 charges... makes sense... but unless Apple has some deal with the people handling the credit cards, they are paying 30 to them per purchase, right? any stores i worked at the card company took 30 per transaction plus somehting like
again, Apple says their store is there to keep the iPod sales up, but if Apple is "doing it right" and motivated to REALLY be selling iPods, how can the other online music stores make any money? i guess the answer is volume?
Started having financial trouble in the mid-to-late-nineties, and it's been going downhill ever since. At the time, management blamed the "death of grunge", with no clear next-big-thing to follow up on it. Grunge was really the last big mass-marketed new genre. Now, everything is micro-marketed--you've got several flavors of techno, world music, country, rap, whatever...each with their own devoted following. ("I'm a jungle beat fanatic, I would never listen to that acid jazz crap", etc)
So now if a label needs to sell hit records to most of America, they need to have hit records in something like twelve genres. They used to just have to squeeze out a Whitesnake or a Pearl Jam record every few years to keep the money coming.
Yes, there's "pop" tripe like Celine Dion, but it's not like it used to be. The age range for candy pop ballads has shrunk dramatically, as kids wean themselves from if earlier and join some subgenre clique (or even the dreaded "all subgrenres are great" subgenre clique, which is the most exclusive of all!)
Yes, there's some bleeding due to piracy, but massive piracy has been around since the eighties, and I really don't see any signs of it getting worse. Who's to say those who are downloading pirated music would not have bought pirated music, or simply done without, if downloading was not an option? If anything, I'd say downloaded pirated music is hurting the sales of pirated media worst of all.
And then there's the whole factor of price. The price of CDs has gone up, and if you adjust for inflation, it's more than doubled since CDs were first introduced. Raise the price, while keeping the product quality the same (or arguably worse), and it's not exactly a surprise that demand has gone down. Simple economics people. Charge $10 for all new CDs and watch the money roll back in as demand returns to what it once was.
What people don't seem to grasp is that people LIKE physical media, that the physical media produced by labels (if it isn't copy-protected) is superior (more durable, cover art, liner notes) than what you can make at home. People also don't mind paying a reasonable price for what they want.
that post was definately better read in the Comic Book Guy voice. bravo.
So: even among downloaders there's still a group, one third of the total, that does still find it important to "hold a physical object." I have to believe that among non-downloading music consumers the number of people still interested in the "physical object" is essentially 100 per cent.
The question then is how many non-downloaders purchase music? And among the downloaders that are interested in the physical object: is the physical object really important to them? Also, from the Forrester "Quick View" of the "Discs to Downloads" report:
- Proliferating on-demand media services will overtake piracy.
- In five years, 33% of music sales will come from downloads.
Sounds to me like there still a lot of potential for sales of physical media -- even if it's not exactly the mass market it used to be.What kind of store allows you to trade calamari for records? I'm confused.
Years ago, before any of this interweb business happened ('91? '92?), there was a video rental store here that had an IMDB-like system. It was CD-ROM based, had a color touchscreen, and was wrapped in a kiosk for casual customer perusal. It was right next to the SNES demo rig, and I seem to recall it working fairly well.
It's not there anymore.
Kid-proof tablet..
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the music industry. My last paragraph should have made that clear.
By creating a system where there are only 20 bands getting any real airplay on the radio, with much of the play limited to 1-3 songs off of the latest album, the recording industry has made it exceedingly easy for a person to download the top 40 in any given month. Why would someone shell out 340 dollars to buy all of the albums at 17 dollars a pop, when they can just download the songs that they are hearing on the radio, in a single afternoon, from the convenience of their own home?
The death of the record store is due to online piracy. The reason for the piracy is an industry which was slow in realizing it's danger, and incompetant in adjusting to a reality when a ten song album can be downloaded in 15 minutes, or the choice three songs in 5.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Don't go to McDonalds looking for steak.
DJs have been and will continue to use record stores for quite a while. Of course, the type of record store a DJ goes to is nothing like the kind most people go to. It's all underground music, mostly vinyl, mostly electronic music. DJs love vinyl, it's just an integral part of the DJ culture, and it's not going to let up anytime soon.
Think of the thousands of pot-heads out there who will have no place to buy questionable detox supplements, no place to buy artistic "tobacco" paraphernalia... Where will I get gallons and gallons of patchouli oil?
We must not let the local record stores die!
Maybe if you visited a non "Mega" store, you'd have some help. What you got is exactly what I'd expect from a big box store. If you want service, go to an independent store.
Almost everything in the mainstream press regarding the effects of technology on the music business is written with the built-in assumption that it's vitally important to preserve the recording industry's income stream. Everybody who proposes a future model for distributing music is supposed to do it in a way that keeps record companies in business. Yet when record stores go out of business, they are just normal casualties of competition and progress. No biggie. We'll get over it.
Of course we will. But we'll also get over not having record companies between musicians and the public, filtering what gets copied and distributed and controlling what buyers (and even the musicians themselves) are allowed to do with the copies. I don't know when I last read any mainstream article suggesting that the whole recording industry should go the way of record stores. But it should.
What about used record stores? How are they doing in all this? I find more of what I'm looking for at used stores anyway, and none of what I spend goes to greedy record labels.
Just a thought.
And because Tower Records had a scary goth kid with far too many piercings working the cash register.
Oh so you're the jerk that walked out after giving me that odd look! I know where you post now, muahahaha!
The truth is, he got a new thesaurus for X-mas and he's not afraid to use it. "labyrinthine kiosk"?? What the fuck? It's a keyboard with a search button for god's sake. How much easier could it possibly be? Either they have the music or they don't. If you can't find it after "trudging through the blizzard" then go order it on Amazon you stupid fuck.
The reason music retailers in general are hurting is because of the high price of CDs. No one wants to pay the same price for a music CD as they would for a DVD. However, there is a huge demand for music. Most people I know would buy endless amounts of music if CDs were between $6 and $9 regularly. Even many good independent titles cost over $12 to buy. This is absurd when most DVDs cost $10-$20. But, record stores can do nothing about this because of the current distribution model. Record stores will perish if many of the current middlemen in the industry aren't cut out. Of course, it is hard for labels to sell directly to every retailer, but it seems prices could be cut by doing this. I know of many strong independent labels that sell directly from their website, skipping the whole distribution process altogether! There are also other ways to keep music stores open. For one, they need to get away from being "just" record stores. Many sell clothing. Another way for small, independent stores to get a regular customer base is to setup shop in a place that has a small venue so bands can play there. Do free(or cheap) shows, and people will buy things while they are there. Many other ideas in this thread are good too. Setup terminals so people can research music. Make the store a "hip" spot to go to. Get involved with the local music scene. Sell used CDs as cheap as possible. I am personally tired of hearing little record stores bitch about how downloads hurt their business. The business has changed. Either adapt, or perish. It is really rather simple.
I prefer buying CDs at Walmart and Best Buy because the people working there arent the hardcore music freaks, they are the teenagers who need a quick job and got sent to the music department. It really gets me angered when I ask for a CD and the salesmen degrades my choice. An example at a Tower Records would be: Me: Do you have the new MXPX CD? Tower Guy: Ugh...MXPX totally sold out. They are not even punk anymore. Me: Well, where could I find it? Tower Guy: All of there new stuff is horrible. I dont know how anyone can like it. You should check out their old stuff. Me: I have their old stuff, I want the new one. Can you show me where it is? Tower Guy: We're sold out. That just pisses me off. At Best Buy you ask them, they check and they tell you if they have it and where to get it. So much easier.
Where do I buy albums?
1) iTunes Music Store - typically $9.99 per album, no matter the length. I get to preview the music and instant gratification. Works on my Macs, Dell and iPod.
2) Tower Records - it's across the street from work. If I have a few extra minutes at lunch, I pop in and listen to the "listening stations" (mostly for new electronic stuff). I *rarely* buy anything because there are so few albums on listening stations. I do not buy before trying, except for my favorite few bands (been told to get the new Frontline Assembly album - not on iTunes).
3) Barnes & Noble - they have a very cool system that lets you scan the UPS from any CD in the shop and listen to samples. Very sweet. Not as convenient as iTunes, but if I'm there already getting some books and a crappuccino, I might just go home with a CD or two.
So, WhoreHouse music may be closing its doors. That's fine with me. They don't give me what I want, they go the way of the dodo.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
This is like going into borders or barnes and nobles and asking about an obscure book, and finding a moron who only knows about comic books. Even worse, he only knows about the last 6 months worth of comic books.
To top it off, these massive music stores drove the little stores out of business, and the people who worked at the smaller store i'm sure would probably be able to answer most of the questions you had about the type of music they sold in their store.
Why should people be forced to use a terminal? Why should people be forced to only be able to browse through a selection of pop music? Is it so that the music industry can force feed us pop crap just so the execs can make another couple million?
Hey buddy, the term is "music history knowledge" and our society is losing it more and more every day.
Hey buddy, the term is "target audience" and sorry, but you're not in it.
The point of the parent article is that very few people appear to be in that target audience. Therefore, the retailers aren't trying hard enough, and that seems quite obvious, now, doesn't it, given the grandfather post's issues.
So much for target audiences. Work on your next theory, this one isn't holding water.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
People have been predicting the demise of the record store since tapes were invented. OH NO! they screamed, the ease of copying tapes will drive all these people out of business....guess what, it will never happen. Records are better than CD's, you get much more for your money, they are tough as hell and only indie stores sell them. Instant niche market. Anachronistic record stores complaining about online stores taking their market, put your product...gasp...online! It is not hard, and there are plenty of out of work web developers and struggling hosting services that you could do it cheap. It is like buisinesses think consumers owe them something. "This is how we have always done it, we deserve to still make money from it even though people are demanding more".
Well, I hope, I will find very sad the day when I'll be unable to buy vinyls though.
Actually I think that just because of this internet downloading thing, the stores will get more DJ oriented, a niche market but still a market, just ask Vestax, Technic, Numark or any of the other numerous manufacturers of turnables and DJ mixers. That's a good thing, CD sucks anyways for skratching or any serious work beyond "disco mobile" or italian wedding parties. It will get beautifull when you'll be able to order a vinyl copy of the song on iTune music store or whatever would include that feature. Much like you can order prints of your photos in many photo managing apps, of course, as usual, DJs won't mind paying more for a vinyl copy, we already pay most 12" between 12$CDN and 20$CDN, yes 20bucks, very rarely though, money's thight, and for the vinyl impaired, 12" = single + a B side, a B side is another or some other version(s) of the song on the other side (radio edit, a cappella, instrumental, remixes) or sometimes, when the Gods are happy, a never before released song and most often never will be released again, a DJ exclusive, a gold mine if it's good, which sometimes isn't.
Of course FinalSkratch will accellerate the transition to digital but the medium will still be analog, Stanton will need to get record pressed with their timecode on for us to twist it to our heart content. Nothing to date is able to reproduce a turntable for skratching, nothing, it's just hmm hmm good.
Here in San Francisco, Amoeba Records is surviving quite well. With three store locations, they're actually turning a profit while the Best Buy in San Francisco is having problems with their CD sales. In fact, I just came back from shopping the Haight and grabbed a couple of CDs myself at Amoeba. Everytime I walk down the Haight I always stop by Amoeba and grab something new from their used section. (Recently, it's been the Drum & Bass section.)
These reviews pretty much sum up Amoeba records.
Maybe Best Buy can learn some of the tricks that Amoeba does, like maybe lower prices, a good used section, oh! Or maybe unique listening styles rather than top 40 crap!
They used to have just one huge toy store in Manhattan. It was a destination in itself, with floors and floors of one-of-a-kind imported, educational, high-margin toys you couldn't get anywhere else.
Then the MBA Borg moved in, took the company public, opened FAO Schwarzes in shopping malls (e.g. Caesars Palace in Las Vegas), dumped the one-of-a kind toys that had distinguished the FAO Schwarz brand, and filled the stores with the same crap as Toys-R-Us. This resulted in the 150 year-old company's going into Chapter 11 and eventually oblivion.
Guess what? YOUR not in Virgin's target demo, boo hoo hoo. Guess what else? If your over 21 or so, (and this pretty much applies to anyone in the US), your not in it either. Get over it, it's one of the price's we pay for growing older. Don't like it? Shop online - the demo's are a bit different, and I'll practically garauntee you that your choice of selections will be better. You may not experience the 'instant gratification' feeling that so many shopper's become addicted to, but I'm sure, that eventually, you'll find exactly what your looking for. Remember that old quote 'One man's garbage is another man's treasure'? It's very true when it's applied to internet shopping.
ps: read my sig, in your case, it's very applicable.....
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
On a recent trip to Japan I noticed the huge difference in attitude towards music sale. For example, there are many music stores in Japan that rent music CD's. I don't think there's a single store in the US where you can do this. In addition, these same stores sell bulk packs of CD-R's!! It costs about US$1.00 to rent a CD album for a few days. These stores are usually frequented by young people and are very busy on a typical day. Business must be good.
Legal complications aside, the US based music stores (and us consumers) might have something to gain by taking a lesson from the Japanese.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I also remember the local video store chain here that was bought out by Blockbuster had these 3" or 4" inch thick books with every single motion picture thats been published to video tape or LaserDisc in them.
The local used music swap-shop is going stronger than ever. The RIAA doesn't like it, but fuck them.
I went into a local Wherehouse to track down the Transformers season 1 DVD box set a couple of years ago. It wasn't in any of the obvious places, so I asked a clerk.
He looked around for awhile, then finally turned them up in the kids section. I told him flat out: today's kids will have no idea what this is. Only people my age will appreciate it, so you have this in the wrong place!
That aside, then he pulled them out of the rack and showed me what he had: the separate discs, not the box set. I asked for the box set and he said they didn't carry it. Undeterred, I then asked if he could order it. He said they didn't do that.
I went home empty-handed, visited my favorite online vendor, and got them a few days later. A couple of months later, that location went out of business.
Coincidence? If you don't serve the customers, someone else will. I was willing to pay sales tax and actually leave the house (horrors!) if they would help me find things, but with an attitude like that, they can go screw themselves.
If this kills the chains and leaves the little independent guys who will still help you out, that would be fine by me.
Speaking as someone who worked in record stores for over ten years, I can tell you: the issue becomes one of the in-store service meeting the claims of the store's slogan. Any chain that claims to have the "biggest selection" of something had better have the staff to weed through it all. In pretty much every store I worked at, I was the only person who knew anything about classical, jazz, and obscure pop or alternative recordings. It got tiresome because out of a staff of dozens I was run off my feet trying to answer all these ridiculous questions from suits who basically wanted to gab about how elite their record collection was. I am thankful every day for the invention of napster et al for the very reason that now nothing is "obscure." Nothing is "limited edition" anymore. Two searches and you're probably able to find whatever it is. If you really need the physical CD, good luck finding anyone who knows how to find it. Not just music either. (Try rare books. Even harder finding anyone who knows their sh*t.)
:)
Anyway my point is yes it's an issue, but I'm not sad to see record stores go away. Add in the fact that anything truly worth purchasing ends up being something you have to special order anyway and I might as well stick with Amazon from now on. Which I do.
If Virgin Megastore wants to continue to claim they have the "hugest collection of anything musical on earth", they should step up to the plate and hire people who know more than six months' worth of musical artists. That and pay them for their knowledge (something else that won't happen.)
The same holds true for a Future Shop / Best Buy etc. for electronics. What's the point of claiming you're the "HDTV headquarters" when nobody on the staff even knows what that is?
ad
Because I can! [Brainrub.com]
No, I'm that odd looking fellow in the ThinkGeek T-shirt who spent a lot of time skulking around in the blues, jazz and folk sections, then spent about half an hour looking at Jim Morrison posters and left without buying anything or forming eye contact with anyone.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
But no, you're just more human pollution with a shoulder chip.
I used to love going to Manifest when I was going to USC, but I can understand the decision. My 7 year old 110 disk CD player broke recently, and I was thinking about buying a replacement, but with exponential technological advance, I can now fit all that information in a tiny iPod. Ever onward then, I look forward to neural implants and sensory augmentation...
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
If they put a music/movie review "terminal"
in stores, with honest feedback, it would kill whatever sales they had left.
Word of mouth is entirely different with the internet. If a film gets panned on the internet, attendance dies, how many movies have you avoided because you heard they were awful on the net?
Let's face it, an educated decision is a dangerous one to marketing folks.
You make the RIAA and it's ilk money:
I will shed no tears for you.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
There was an article about Tower in Forbes, oh, 3-4 years back. The owners (Tower Records is privately held) were asked about the threat of online music distribution and they totally brushed it off. Even at the time it was obvious that they were short sighted morons.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Let's face it folks.
The small record or book store are disappearing because they just can't compete on sheer volume against the superstores--both brick and mortar and online.
I mean think about it. What happened when stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble with their very large book selection spread all over the USA, not to mention the rise of online bookstores like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com? It effectively killed off the smaller book store almost everywhere (as evidenced by the decline and fall of A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Books, Stacey's, and Printers, Ink in the southern San Francisco Bay Area).
The same is now happening to the music and home video business. The rise of superstores such as Best Buy and the sheer volume of business done by Wal-Mart's audio and video software departments (not to mention the rise of online record and home video stores) are pretty much killing off a lot of smaller record and video stores all over the place. Tower Records--because of its major brick and mortar presence--is suffering because of this sea change in music/home video retailing.
Sure, it was interesting! A geek claiming to have left their parent's basement to venture out into the big wide world? What more did you want?
scary goth kid with far too many piercings
Bit of a bigot, aren't you? Ten years ago, I bet you complained about guys with earrings or multiple piercings in the ears.
20 years ago, I bet you complained about whatever fashion was prevalent at the time? (What was the offensive style back in 1980? Probably spiked hair.)
30 years ago, you probably complained about long-haired hippies. Or maybe you *were* one of those long-haired hippies?
It's just a fashion statment 99% of the time. Usually done because their peers dress that way or because they want to rebel a little (so if they get a rise out of you, they win). Half the time if you talk to them, they're just as nice as any other kid. Most teenagers / young adults would be happy if the world would just *stop* for a few days so that they could figure out where they fit in the whole. Part of figuring out themselves involves a lot of expirementation / fantasy-dress.
With digital photography, we're not far off from "the photo lab" being a machine in your local 7/11 where you insert your USB memory key and some coins.
There'll be a plaace for a few stores that sell lenses and specialist photo services, but no "happy snap" stores.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
...I used to love to go to record stores back in the vinyl days just to peruse the cover art. It was like going to a museum. Say what you will about technological progress, but the LP format was a great venue for graphic art as well as music!
Most record stores aren't stupid. I happen to own one and I know a lot of other people that do too. In fact, I run a whole web site devoted to finding the good ones.
The reason that record stores are going out of business is two-fold:
1. Product is too expensive and there is very poor availability. It has been like this since CDs came out.
2. People can get everything they want for free.
The result obviously is that no one except true music lovers are willing to buy anything. The blame should be shared equally between the industry for not making a good, affordable product, and the consumer for not appreciating that music is art and costs money. Neither of these has anything to do with record stores being stupid. If anything, the local independent record store has been the only reason that the whole music industry didn't implode in the 70s.
Local stores provide an invaluable "gatekeeper" service which determines what records become classics and what records become popular. All day long, I'm listening to new music and selecting the best stuff for my clients. I'm always learning their taste, and they mine, and I can pull 10 records at any time that I know a particular person will like. It's kind of sad that people don't want this kind of interaction anymore.
It reminded me of the time on Teen Jeopardy many years back when none of the kids had ever heard of the Beatles. It sucks to get old.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Wait, no, that was Jack Black.
You make a good point. Sadly, no one seems to want that kind of interaction anymore. Too much of a hurry, too personal. As a result, can this be far off?
Honestly, though, prices partly keep me from being one of the guys you're handing ten albums to. I like to browse, but most people, if they don't have that personal relationship, would rather hit the checkout and be home all the sooner to start listening to their tunes, or on the way to someplace else.
Yeah, I also had video store in my town around '95 which had a Microsoft Cinemania installed on a PC for customers to look up movies they were interested in. Not as nice as imdb but still quite neat. They did get rid of the PC few years back though :(
...forced to use a terminal? Why should people be forced to only be able to browse...
Forced?! That's quite strong language for this situation. You certainly have the right to go anywhere you want to shop. Personally I prefer using a terminal, and do so from my house when I want music. If I went to the store I wouldn't expect them to stock everything or know everything ever created in the past 100 years. They hire those ignorant kids because the main people who buy music (aka the target market aka teenagers) want pop music, not classic artists.
I think your Borders or Barnes and Noble analogy is a good one, but you messed it up a little. IIRC those stores don't specialize in comic books, but the last 6 months worth of the New York Times Best Sellers List is about all I expect the store staff to know without their computers. I honestly don't expect any of them to know where the "Cornelia Funke" books are.
When I want more in depth knowledge, I'll shop myself on google or amazon before leaving the house. Sometimes I won't leave the house and just shop online, which is the point of this story, but the arrogant dude with the thesaurus was trying for a different point.
Oh well, and so is the price of change.
I wonder how long until Tower records starts petitionling the government for a bailout in order to "save important jobs"
s'wut i sed.
"It's kind of sad that people don't want this kind of interaction anymore."
;) Spreading the margins over several CDs makes more sense.
Actually, people do.
Most of the big box retailers are spread too thin as far as selection goes, and pop doesn't account for the entirety of the market.
Most shops I go to usually specialize in a particular genre of music that isn't mainstream or obscure recordings (or vinyl for that matter). It's fringe, but one area where Best Buy can't compete. It also makes for a devoted customer base.
And, as you pointed out, those shops act as a pretty good filtering mechanism. Radio fails in this respect and one of the difficulties of online music is the sheer amount; and the majority is substandard. The record shops are pretty good at gauging the pulse of their market. Even the recommendations from Amazon pale in comparison to a knowledgeable staff.
And when the population is sick of the single, where do they go then? The extreme focus on the single (iTunes) makes a niche market for music stores by default. Whether it is profitable enough to be self-sustaining is the question, but I don't notice video games stores planning for obsolescence even though they have many of the same problems.
The big question is margin. Cds usually run for around $18. Even with the added value a record store gives, it's hard to justify when I can by the exact same item for $10 online. Eight bucks doesn't seem like much, but multiply that by the 700 or so CDs I own. If I walk out of a store with only one CD, you haven't done your job as far as making recommendations
One thing I've noticed is a few record shops offering single pricing ($12 and $18) on their entire stock. Again, the margins are spread out, and I usually end up buying more.
I don't see the end of the independent record shops, but it will certainly be less profitable than it has been. People still want to be introduced to new music, people still like the physical document. With radio gone to hell, and everyone scavenging for the latest hype, I see lots of opportunities for record stores willing to play to their strengths.
The problem with that is even with advanced Internet search technology, you will still get results saying that Band X rules, others saying Band X sucks.
Also, by having in store PCs, you could log what people are searching for, and perhaps actually *stock* what people are after.
And that, my children, is the story of how all record stores transformed into adult bookstores.Where did he say anything about his tastes being 'elite'?
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I talked to the owner of the used cd store 2 blocks from my college when he closed it last year, he told me:
a) he got most of his cool vinyl when people switched to CDs in the 1980s and recently the only used vinyl he got offered was from the 1980s- bad metal and corporate rock. he said he was getting one person bringing in sellable vinyl a week as opposed to 2 or 3 people bringing in records he could sell PER DAY in the 80s/90s. I remember buying trashed out of print 1960s rock records for $2-4 each when I was in school.
b) around 2000 a kid came in and sold 150 or so cds. The kid bragged that he converted all his music to mp3 and now he was going to sell every cd he owned. My buddy offered him almost $700 in store credit but the kid said he wanted the cash because he was never going to buy cds again. The kid got $500 and my friend realized his days were numbered when a kid with a good cd collection didn't want to buy cds any more. That was a wake-up call that I heard about practically every time I visited the store.
c) more and more kids rejected his $3 and $4 he would offer for used cds, opting instead to sell them on ebay for $6. He complained he wasn't getting offered the collections he used to because people were peeling off the good stuff and putting it on ebay.
d) about a week before he decided to close the store another kid came in trying to sell homemade CD-Rs then whined and begged to be allowed to bring his laptop in and convert the guy's $7 used cds to mp3s and was so obnoxious that he had to be physically removed from the store. My friend admitted to himself that if students aren't willing to spend $7 on a cd then they probably just want everything free.
I know he complained that his take-home salary was dropping every year just as his wife got a raise every year. Last I heard, he's selling the remainder of his stock on ebay and owns some kind of snack bar downtown.
People have been spouting a lot of nonsense ideas in this thread, but nary a one includes moneymaking ideas- ideas that will make enough money to cover brick and mortar overhead. in-stores, DSL connections, etc don't bring in money, they drain money.
I've also only lived in the United States for about 16 years now, so 20 years ago I wasn't actually aware that real people actually had spiked hair. It was just something you saw on imported American television.
And today my hair actually is quite long, 2-3 inches past my shoulders. In many ways, I am something of a hippy.
Way to make a bunch of false assumptions in a message in which you're criticizing me for being too presumptuous.
As for goth kids and my finding them scary... I can honestly say I've never behaved rudely towards any of them in any way. I've never stared, I've never made comments, nothing of the sort. They do make me feel unpleasant in a general way, though, and it's very likely that if they weren't there (or weren't made up in a scary way), I'd walk into the store much more often.
Let me assure you -- there are a number of aspects to my own personality that would probably make most people feel uncomfortable or possibly even scared if I chose to display them openly to anyone who happened to walk past me. But I choose not to do so. It gives me more pleasure to have people smile at me and speak to me politely than it would to have everyone know every detail of my perverse personality immediately.
The people I'm referring to as "scary goth kids" have made a different choice on the same issue. This is their right. But in making that choice, unless they're complete idiots, which I'd prefer not to assume any group of people are as a whole, they must realize that they will be making people feel uncomfortable, and that some of these people will be openly rude as a result... While others, like me, may have less obvious adverse reactions. And that only a relatively small portion of the population will consider their style of dress to be a plus.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
But this one's actually more on-topic than the parent, I think.
It occurs to me that another way to think of this, my having called goth kids "scary" is as follows...
The role of music in today's society seems to be closely involved with the concept of individuality. As I said, in many ways I am a hippy... And even though I wasn't alive when the "actual" hippies were around, it seems to me that they made the choice to be "scary" and different because the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood offered to them by the hippy culture was a lot more appealing than polite interaction with "the man" was.
I feel understand and comprehend this.
And I'm also capable of making the leap (hopefully a correct leap) that goth kids feel a similar sense of camaraderie with each other.
But I'm not one of them and do not feel this camaraderie with them. And, just as the hippies understood that the "normal world" probably won't accept them, goth kids must understand that much of the world won't accept them...
But from the music store's perspective... They're selling individuality. They want misunderstood people, because they want people who feel misunderstood and who rely on music to help them articulate this feeling and understand themselves better, to come in and shop there.
But the problem is that misunderstood people feel misunderstood for a bunch of different reasons. So whichever group of misunderstood people you pick to represent your store... Anyone from any other group will still feel a bit uncomfortable.
Not so with online stores, though. Online stores can custom tailor what you see to your personality, based on your previous purchases, the items you've recently looked at, etc... Amazon style. And can present you with a storefront that makes you feel optimally comfortable.
So... I guess I'm suggesting that maybe brick-and-mortar stores, if they wish to survive, need to give up on this notion of making outcasts feel less like outcasts by having outcasts as employees... And instead just try to be comfortable towards everyone almost equally.
Kindda like the "reasonably priced restaurant" version of a record store. A Denny's style record store. No one really likes it too much, but if it's 3am and you're really hungry and everything else is closed, you're gunna go there anyway.
Now someone's going to reply and tell me about how much they really like Denny's and I'm horrible for criticising it. I can just feel it.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
- Knowledge Base - simply put, the people who work at my store love music. We were the dorks in junior high school who would harangue our parents for change to go buy a used Misfits tape, dig through their old Motown vinyl, and get into heated lunchroom debates about whether Question Mark and the Mysterians were more proto-punk or proto-glam. The down side to this is that we don't get laid much. The up side is that we tend to have an easy time helping people find what they need, and making suggestions based on what they like. Repeat customers account for at least 3/4 of our business.
- Format - We carrry vinyl, cassette tapes and VHS as well as CDs, SACDs, DVDs...heck - we still have a small laserdisk selection. We sell both new and used. And, believe it or not, the new and used vinyl has been our life vest. Vinyl simply sounds better than digital formats to a good number of people. We sell used CDs for around 40-50% of their list prices and guarantee them the same as we guarantee new CDs.
- Inventory - Over time, we have gutted most of our major-label ordering. We keep older titles that consistently sell (The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry", Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", etc.) and do paper-thin new-release orders. For the most part we now order most of our new stock through indie lables or indie distributers. We tend to sell a lot of underground dance and hip hop as well as indie rock. Major-label-oriented giant one-stops do not. Translation: we have that obscure 12" by that band your parents hate and Best Buy doesn't.
We're still struggling, but we're going to be around for some time yet, and doing enough business to make it worthwile.CD's are more expensive then vinyl was yet are cheaper to produce, transport and stock. Odd? Look at DVD vs VHS. A dvd happily sits next to a tape for twice the price overhere. Is it me or is one of them a whole lot cheaper to make?
So you got bach lovers who kept their vinyl. The cd's fans who have finished replacing their collection and people like me that go "How much for a piece of plastic with holes in it?".
Quite frankly I don't care if all the music stores close. To bad for the people who lose their income but this industry is to sick. Time to shoot the patient.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
MODERATORS: please do not moderate patented bullshit "insightful." It just encourages more of the same.
If "very few people" were in the target market, then I'm pretty sure that multibillion-dollar Virgin would change their target market.
You know why they call it "pop" music? Because it's short for "popular." As in "enjoyed by many." The fact that you don't like it doesn't change the fact that many other people do, and those many other people comprise a target market that's so big there's room for Virgin, Tower, Sam Goody, and a hundred other less-well-known chains, as well as countless thousands of local record stores.
Sorry, friend, but Quincy Jones has never been popular. Don't expect music stores that focus on popular music to stock his discography.
He didn't actually say "elite," but he directly implied it by saying they don't sell music, they sell pop culture.
The world can be wrong today for once.
The world can be wrong today for once.
So listen to Band X's music, and decide for yourself.
The world can be wrong today for once.
(Playing devil's advocate) if you were willing to pay $16 for a CD in 1988, then $16 today shouldn't seem that bad.
Of course you could look at it another way: circa 1990, when the record industry decided to kill the vinyl LP by no longer accepting returns from stores, they were typically retailing for around $8. $8 in 1990 is about $12 or so today, so that would seem a reasonable retail price for a CD.
Of course we should factor in that CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl LPs ever were, so really they ought to be under $10 now.
why was this modded down?
I guess I'm glad you don't like me, whoever you are, single Anonymous Coward among the undifferentiated mass of Anonymous Cowardice, if it keeps you out of my way. I'm probably gladder I don't know you, or any of the other Anonymous posts which purport to know me. What I said was that some Anonymous Coward was anonymous, and cowardly, and now apparently stalking my posts, without even relating their flames to the thread. It's not really important, even to me, but it's worth saying, even if you don't like it. My only shoulder chip is disrespect, and anonymous criticism, without any substance, but full of venom, flips my chip.
So I post a quick story of my recent experience with the doomed retail record megastore, get attacked by anonymous posters, defend myself from their hyperbolic attacks, and then I'm uninteresting and egotistical. You should watch more TV.
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And because Tower Records had a scary goth kid with far too many piercings working the cash register. That's reason enough to support brick & mortar record stores....Do you want the scary goth kid with far too many piercings handling your food at Mc Donalds, greeting you at Wal-Mart or driving the forklift at Home Depot? Record stores may be the only employment option some of these guys have...the last time I went to Tower, all the registers looked like they were manned by the ghosts from Thirteen Ghosts. But the only really scary thing about them was the disinterest they had in doing their jobs and the apparent disdain they had for dealing with their customers. I haven't shopped there since.
broller's view is certainly different from mine, at least in regards to how "interesting" we each find my megastory. And their sarcastic trivializing of the details of my story indicate that they think my experience was acceptable, that the state of these megastores is adequate (or better). Of course they're entitled to their different view. But they're out of line for his harsh, obnoxious sniping.
As for the Internet, I found a few sites which offer the single itself, in WAV, with two stereo MP3s accounting for the first and second minute of a 3 minute song, as a preview, and a $1 download. Without stomping through the blizzard, without wandering the aisles of crapola and their displaced burger flippers, and without rubbing elbows with broller and their dubious taste.
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Not a single of your itemized demands will be met due to the inability of even the BEST retailer (the retailer of your wet dreams that seems to have been made exclusively for GabrielStrange) can compete on price. It gets no more logical than that.
:-);
Do you know what an inventory burden it is keeping anything you'd ever dream of in stock at any given time? Tower tried this for years (yes, the majority of product on their floor, in terms of dollars and units, is devoted to what they call in the biz "deep catalog") and have now obviously failed. Amazon can do "deep and wide" because they have a warehouse the size of the mall of america and the package freight handlers (UPS, FedEx, etc.) now have their operations down to a well-honed science. All you are missing is immediacy, which is what iTunes promises.
They can't play up their ability to offer instant gratification because the ability to carry the "blubber" of a fully-stocked deep catalog rode on the backs of the "Britney, Limp Bizkit, BT, Pink, or any other top-40 "artist"" that you rightly denigrate.
We can hem and haw about this that and the other, but once the critical mass of hits buyers left the building for Napster and MP3s, the support infrastructure weakened and is now collapsing.
This is not mass ignorance on the part of the retailer (although, they were always vulnerable as middle-men). The high prices accumulated like a snowball as the "product" changed hands. Granted, during the boom years, greed was riding high and $20 IS waaaaay too much when technology is supposed to be paying consumers back through efficiency-induced lowered operating/production costs.
You want immediacy? iTunes (and their ilk) and Kazaa. You want to play the old game but retain wide selection? Amazon. You want a retro experience from the "good old days?" You neighborhood shop will do:
Rasputin's; Plan 9 - not the OS
A-
shock the monkey
First, I didn't imply that the internet wasn't a better place to shop for music. In fact, except out of curiosity, I never visit music stores. As for my "dubious" music tastes, as a fellow slashdotter pointed out, I never said that I enjoyed the music that you trudged past. We're not so different in our musical tastes, and as I can see from your others posts on slashdot, we both have a soft spot for sarcasm. The difference between the two of us is that I know what the target market of these "megastores" is and am aware that I'm not in it. This is why we have the choice to go elsewhere and support the businesses that carry the products and services that we want.
Would you also complain that Wal-Mart didn't carry quality suits for men? Sure, they have jeans and sweaters, but they are completely devoid of high quality clothing that one would expect from a clothier. Why? Because people don't go to megastores for quality, they go to buy what is popular.
And no, Quincy Jones does not qualify as a popular artist. When speaking of sales of music from a music store, "popular" is defined by what people buy, not the general regard of their music accomplishments. I would prefer to listen to his music over the stuff they sell most often at Virgin, but when it comes to inventory control, they would be foolish to stock equal amounts of each artist. I would rather the employees of any store to know more about the popular items than the items which sell rarely. Otherwise you have store full of "Comic Book Guy" clerks who are clueless about the current line of new products.
I didn't reply to your obnoxious "I prefer to be the hunter, rather than the hunted" comment earlier, but your assertion that I shop at those megastores is quite wrong. Sometimes people who disagree with you aren't as weak and stupid as you might think. Your initial approach may have been wrong-minded, but your following attempts to belittle me say more about your character than mine.
In my reply to Catnapster's post , not to yours, broller, I reiterated my original comparison of the megastore to the Internet, especially valid considering the futility of using even their "catching up with the 1990s" kiosk to "find" a record. Quincy Jones is a popular artist, selling more records (and even more downloads in the absence of marketdroid barriers) even now than so many of the flavor-of-the-week manufactured bands in the megastore bins.
Which is obnoxious, my resistance to being "targetted" with crap, choosing instead to search for what I actually want, or perhaps your opening post in this thread, in which you sarcastically oversimplify my experience with hyperbole, project "boo hoo" onto my adult reactions, and ascribed a completely selfish attitude to my fairly representative experience, which you dismiss as uninteresting, even as you type dozens of paragraphs to debate it? This entire discussion is about the death of the record store! They're dying because they aren't selling to a market, like any other failed business model. Maybe *you* still have faith in peddling pablum to uneducated consumer masses, but even the record store corporations are fleeing the business.
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I still like record stores, just not the megastores, because they're a good place to hang out with other people who like records, chatting and even flirting with record chicks. I think they'll survive, and thrive, if they can drop the dead old biz model, and leverage their human scales and humans. Music is social, and people spend money when we socialize. Maybe not on records, but on something else, if it's available, and fun.
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It's not just me, people are avoiding the failed biz model of the megastore in droves. Hence the story we're all discussing in this thread. As for the demographic, the 35+ demographic is the biggest buyer of recorded music, according to RIAA figures (from real sales). I've been buying the same style of music for decades, first being told that I was too young, now too old - but the most traded files on the Net are usually in my collection. The record stores are the ones which haven't learned to adapt to change, and ironically, you're still dancing to their boring old tune.
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I usually do. My favorite record stores are the ones that sell unreleased live recordings, and the 24-hour used CD/book store in NYC's Alphabet City: something like a walkin closet with one 18" aisle to the cash register, inhabited by a grizzled beat bookworm with a jazz fetish. BTW, I have thousands of CDs, all of which I've bought (except for a few that aren't for sale), and NO music recordings I've downloaded without paying.
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Hell, don't go to McDonald's looking for food - just synthetic poison mass produced for the easily led.
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I actually have a vocabulary that exceeds "fuck", unlike some Anonymous mutherfucker Cowards. Here's a tip: the web has a thesaurus, too; use it to learn the language before matching your sloppy thinking with your foul mouth. I made useful kiosk software for a living, schmuck, I can tell when it's bad. You can't even differentiate between the "numb" touchscreen I referred to, and the anticustomer design of the software, or their inadequate inventory.
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No, you inferred that "Quincy Jones" is an elite taste. Your ignorance doesn't make my interests elite.
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What is it with this "elite" namecalling? Quincy Jones? Motown? If actually reading my post wasn't beneath you, you'd see that I tried to use their staff, without results. I'm not commenting on their "faith", I'm commenting on the substandard entire affair, which demonstrated the reasons why these stores are going the way of the tyrannosaurus: their prey is getting harder to catch with their gargantuan thrashing and tiny brains. Why do you love the endangered predator?
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Wrong again, Anonymous diarrheamouth Coward. "Too much said", by you, is the case, unless you want to start a "conversation" demonstrating the utter futility of your unarmed fencing of wits with me.
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I'm glad that my writing is benefitting from the genuine diction of a true enthusiast.
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Naah.
Educated decisions merely reduce the viability of their forecasts (read: "hopes"). It fucks up the marketers' dark ages equation, where increased advertising ("awareness") equals an increase in revenue.
I'm not going to -not- rent/buy something just because I read a bad review on a kiosk, I'll just get something with better reviews instead. I did, after all, venture out to the place in search of entertainment. I'm not leaving without some.
Which is to say that there's plenty of money to be made; it just won't be where they expect it. Pity, that.
Kid-proof tablet..