Goodnight, Rhino Westwood
Published January 06, 2006
What's worse, I don't much miss it. I might feel a slight passing twinge of nostalgia for Freddie's or ol' John Rans and his Repeat Performance used store in Muncie - but them days is gone. I didn't have to quit them, nor did I particularly make any specific decision to give it up. It's not a function of giving up the things of youth, or any of that. It's just a different time, and I don't need a record store to get ANY of the things I sought there.
So what's different? In short, of course, it's largely the internet - in at least several different ways.
It's not downloading, specifically. The industry complains that we're supposedly downloading everything for free and not paying, but sales figures don't bear that out. CD sales generally are at least fairly steady, or off marginally. But the independent retailers are being smacked down particularly.
As I experience it, there seem to be at least four ways in which the internet has pulled the rug out from under independent record retailers. The first and most important one is selection. Growing up in rural Indiana in the 1970s, I was frustrated by the selection of maybe a couple dozen albums in the local Danner's 3D department store. It was a big find that they actually conjured up an 8-Track copy of Sgt Pepper. A rare trip to a Karma store in Indianapolis was a big deal. Just look at those thousands of selections! Today, though, even the local Wal-Mart has ten times the selection the old Danners had.
But then there is, for starters, Amazon. They have nearly everything that's in print and a lot of stuff that isn't. If they don't have it, it probably can't be found. Being a national and even international seller, they can keep more stuff available than any brick and mortar store could possibly stock. They can certainly provide more selection than any store in rural Indiana. Plus, I can browse sitting in my comfy chair with my choice of music at any hour of the day.
Selection was always my main point in record stores. Even if they were a little more expensive, they had stuff that you just couldn't get other places. Those days are gone though, and they're not coming back.
Also, the internet has just as thoroughly supplanted record stores as a source of knowledge. Besides the selection, cool fan dudes like Richard Foos provided a valuable source of knowledge. Not only did they have more records, they could steer you towards the extra groovy stuff that you might not know you needed to hear. That's the customer service edge K-Mart could never match.
- Goodnight, Rhino Westwood
- Published: January 06, 2006
- Type: News
- Section: Culture
- Filed Under: Culture: Business and Economics, Music: Alternative Rock
- Writer: Al Barger
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- Al Barger's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
All sad but too true, Al, especially this "Geez, I used to hang out in record stores, poring happily for hours through the new releases and crazy used bargains. But no more, though. I'm listening to more - and more different - music than ever before. I'm just not hanging around record stores."
I am always amazed and surprised to find music stores where the clerks actually know about good music, but I see them all slowly falling away, and it is sad, but it does not stop me from primarily downloading tunes , legally whenever possible. I can only hope that as CD's become less used, music publishers large and small will offer up their entire back catalogs online, no more "Lost Bands" that live on only in my very old cassettes and mix tapes. I can only hope.
homebrewing shop I can get to
jasper's in nashua?
Indy CD and Vinyl in the Broad Ripple section of Indianapolis has a good selection - I've bought several CDs there - but I could have found all my purchases on Amazon.com. I just happened to decide to stop at the CD store while I was out.
You mentioned music magazines...Creem was holy writ for me in my late teens through college. Before that, it was Hit Parader, which is where I first heard of the Velvet Underground. Now you can find fan sites for everyone you'd ever heard of on the Internet.
Mark - Stout Billy's in Portsmouth. The owner advised or helped start Redhook, Smuttynose, Ipswich, and a slew of others, and Sam Adams is rumored to be using a recipe or two of his.
Sorry for the threadjacking.
ah yea, stout billy's!
let's unjack then: right around the corner from stout billy's is one of the best record stores in new england: Bull Moose Music.
Mark,
sadly not true anymore... SBs moved to a strip mall down Route 1 to save on rent.
I'll continue this offline.
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/41909)
*cue stentorian voice*
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
Al, you're right of course. Although I can cavil and quibble about the severity and timing of the coming of the Great Record Store Disappearance From Every Shore, I agree with you that people who want physical music media are going to become like model train collectors or home brewers, people with a quirky and obsessive habit that most people just don't understand or care about.
What this means, however, is that although there will be fewer and fewer record shops around, there will always be a FEW. Hell, there's a Lionel shop down the street from my house, the only one for fitty miles around. (Then again, I'm also driving an hour north tomorrow, all the way into New Hampshire, to go to the only really good homebrewing shop I can get to, so maybe the record store situation might be as dire as that.)
I did, however, think that Rhino was going to be one of the survivors.
Goodbye, Rhino!
Goodbye, Electric Fetus!
Goodbye, Music Millennium!
Goodbye, Newbury Comics!
Goodbye, Hear Music!
Goodbye, Bull Moose!
Goodbye, Criminal Records!
Goodbye, Wax Stax!
Goodbye, Outside Music!
See you all on the b-side.