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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
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.
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.
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,