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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 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
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 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.
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
If you already have to register to read articles, I don't see how asking for more info. from the registrant makes it any worse, since whenever I register, I make stuff up off the top of my head to fill in the forms with. Oh, now they want to know my occupation? Quick, roll the dice. That job title looks nice.
Now if the site currently does NOT require registration to read an article, then adding a registration/login step IS annoying. Asking for additional info doesn't mean a thing to me since my sole goal is to skew statistics with randomness.
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 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
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/
I've come across some new mixed concept shops which are geared entirely around local music. The store had a stage for bands to play, sells and promotes local musicians, helps local musicians with recording, etc.. Difficulties in the megastore record store concept might open the door for more local and independent music scene.
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
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!
Napster's and buymusic's DRM restrictions are the exact same. They both use Microsoft's WMA DRM, and the companies do not decide the restrictions in WMA, Microsoft does.
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.
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".
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.
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.Unfortunately, it seems largely recognized that the CD physical format *will* be going out style, and quite soon. While the digital collection may be almost perfectly preserved by backing up on burned discs, what protection do you have when manufacturers stop supporting CDs in favord of Music DVDs and the like? Then you are stuck ripping all your old, scratched up CDs to imperfect digital copies - a major hassle to say the least.
.gif's of the album covers in the ID3 tags, and Musicmatch even allows you to view your mp3 collection as a grid of album art! While this is certainly progress, it's clear that we're not totally beyond the need for physical media.
.... But this is irrelevant, because the main reasons they would need info are (a) recommendations, and (b) finding obscure albums and whatnot. The former - the essence of word-of-mouth popularity - can never really suffer, I think. The latter would be made *easier* by digitizing all CDs and distributing the tracks over searchable online databases. As for analogue media like vinyl, there is no reason why either the market for these goods or the commercial viability of the stores that sell them should be hurt.
The only *real* benefit of physical media that remains is liner notes / album art. There just isn't a good pure-digital substitute for this, unless digital file formats increase in size enough to contain all the same material (which is a major tradeoff). Programs like Musicmatch and iTunes (and others too, I'm sure) have already begun including small
That's almost a moot point, though, as the Industry has already decided that iTunes et al are the future. (Vis a vis, the recent Pepsi iTunes giveaway campaign... a certain precursor to an expanded marketing focus on legit downloads.) After all, it's been clear for some time that CDs, like every medium before them, are destined to be replaced. And if you think that delaying the switch, say, 5 years will make it any less of a pain, just ask the generations who had to switch from 8-tracks to casettes or vinyl to CD. I'm sure they also hoped that their "format [wouldn't] go out of style for quite a while."
As a last point, let me head off the notion that further switch to purely digital distribution will reduce the amount of personal contact with music experts. First of all, the vast majority (probably like 90%, although that number is made up) of buyers don't care what the guy at the counter thinks about music; they just buy what they see on MTV. Second, the remaining 10% or whatever are unable to get meaningful info at large-scale retailers like Tower, HMV, FYE,
in other words, it's a demographic survey to show advertizers, who pay money so the Post doesn't have to charge online readers.
Yup... And I actually answered it honestly, when I visited their site. I don't find that too offensive.
However, one of the linked articles mentioned that in the near future, they will go to a very similar model to the NYT - Lots more than mere demographics, and requiring an actual account (though freely available).
Personally, I suspect this will decrease the quality of responses they get, but, their choice. So, I'll end up doing the same I do for the NYT... Seek an alternate source of the info first, and then use a bogus account if I can't find what I want elsewhere.
Sad, really. You'd think sites like that would have enough of a clue to realize that alienating their potential viewers does not make for good relations with them. "Resentfully lie" does not equal "appreciatively answer three simple and anonymous questions".
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.
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.
The local used music swap-shop is going stronger than ever. The RIAA doesn't like it, but fuck them.
- 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.