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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.
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.
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.
With the disappearance of live music venues, record stores would do well to promote live acts, and give out free samples on CD, which autoload the page that sells the band's merchandise, including recordings. Not only will their retail showrooms generate more revenue per square foot than do their boxes of inventory, but they'll attract more engaging salespeople, and more engaged customers. And there's a tiny chance that the music will improve, as it brings players, listeners and the music together in person, where the muse can play.
--
make install -not war
Used Vinyl != your typical music store.
Used Vinyl stores are still meccas for purists and DJs. They will forever remain alive.
Karma: Non-Heinous
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.
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."
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.
Well it was 'minimal' registration - whatever that means.
/. with a story?
I have a serious suggestion: as so many people are royally pissed at these stupid harvesting zines, why don't we just wait until a decent news source publishes before coming to
So we don't have to hide our tails between our hind legs with unbelievable utterances such as 'minimal registration'.
And thanks, parent, for doing the gentlemanly thing and pasting in the entire article. It was a good read. Most kind of you.
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
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.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
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)
Theres a difference between netflix and itunes. With netflix you have to wait, iTunes you dont. So really, movie rental places are going to have the same hard time when you can get movies on demand, but for now you can't.
I still rent movies, I go and pick up the movies I want, and most of the time I can get it without problems. Netflix is too much work, and you pay for months you dont use. I sometimes don't rent for 2-3 months, then its 3-4 times in a couple weeks. Depending on my work sechedule. The video store is easier for me. Same with iTunes, I want a song or CD, I just go online and buy it.
I've been buying my music online for over 8 years, and tried netflix, after wanting only new movies, and renting when I want, the movie rental shop was better. Plus theres Scarecrow video in Seattle which has so many movies I havnt seen, its fun to browse and pick new movies. I just don't get that experience with record/cd stores.
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.
Just like the recording industry that these stores buy their music from, right? The RIAA has a very conservative view, and it's understandable. They've made billions over the past few years because people paid inflated prices for music. They're still not fully aware that the future rests in iTunes, and not in the Sam Goody in the mall.
Learn something new.
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.
Music sales were declining before music downloading took off. This situation rests on the greedy shoulders of the music industry. They had this monopoly scheme going where they could rip off music fans for $17 for medicore artists and now they think people will be sympathetic when new technology destroys their monopoly system? Like where does it say that they have a right to make billions of dollars? People have been making music for free for thousands of years. The punk movement has been distributing music cheaply for years. There are lots of quality punk CDs out there for $7.
I'm not a big music lover, but I would buy more music if it was cheaper. I had been buying CDs, but then I started wandering around Tower stores that were selling CDs for $17, which was even too expensive for a guy with a professional job. I've downloaded songs and totally support file sharing, but these days I just prefer to listening to the radio or radio stations over the Internet. I'd love to spend money on CDs, but only if they drop below $10.
The music industry just doesn't get it. And nobody sympathizes with a bully after some picked on kid fights back.
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.
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.
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.
"I live my an independent music store that recently shut down due to a Best Buy open up right next door."
Incidentally, this is how the record companies got nailed for price-fixing a few years back:
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
I agree. The stores in LA that focus on used and rare vinyl (Rhino and Amoeba being the largest, but many smaller ones too) are doing just fine... Whereas used chains like Wherehouse that only sold CDs are going under right and left. Vinyl records are collectible objects that go up in value, sometimes astronomically... But even the rarest bootleg CD will never be worth more than you paid for it.
Of course, this has nothing to do with the big chains like Tower, but I say good riddance anyway. In fact, they should pay me back for the hundreds of crappy "alternative rock" cassettes I bought from them in high school. Speaking of which, anyone want to buy a full set of warped Camper Van Beethoven tapes?
"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.