hear hear, or else we won't...

[acroyear]

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Going off the record:

I can't help feeling that an important educational window is closing with the demise of record stores. Yes, it will be easier and cheaper to get the piece you already know you want online. But what about the piece or the genre you didn't know about until you started browsing through the records in places like Tower? How are you going to learn about Hindemith or Art Tatum if you don't know about them already? Online music destroys many barriers while erecting others. The liberation of discovery won't be impossible in the new world, but I fear it might be a bit harder.

Comments

[theshaggyfreak.livejournal.com]

It's always been rather unlikely for me to purchase a CD from a store like Tower of a band that I wasn't familiar with. I tend to go to used CD shops to experiment with unfamiliar territory. Then again, I tend to buy most of my CD's used these days anyway.

[johnbroadfoot.livejournal.com]

I completely agree. It's been nearly four years since the last record store in this town vanished and we miss it very much. It's like when I'd ask my dad what something was and he'd tell me to look it up. He knew that, on my way to the proper entry in the encyclopedia, I'd discover all manner of other things to hold my interest.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

While I'll miss Tower about as much as the author, I respectfully disagree with his conclusion that record stores are all that educational or that the internet can't be educational when it comes to music. Maybe it is easier when you have a well defined genre or subgenres, but in the huge mass that is "Rock/Pop", you never know what you are going to get if you pick some random album.

While Tower had listening stations, you were limited to what Tower was featuring. If they didn't feature something, you had to know what you were looking at. Also, at Tower's prices, it didn't really lend itself to blind buys. The funny thing is, with the closing of Tower, it allowed me to be a bit more adventurous with my purchaces. I tooks some risks, and I didn't have many regrets.

The now defunct Blockbuster Music had a better idea: the ability to be able to open a CD and actually listen to it before buying. What's the point of having a huge catalog without giving people the opportunity to actually experience some of it before buying?

The internet has been a boon for the niches. You can find forums for genres you like and find bands like the ones you already like that you may never have heard of. You can download clips or whole songs of bands you may not have heard of for a fraction of the price that Tower charges to buy blind. Fact is, I've discovered more music because of the Internet than I ever did browsing record stores.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, with the closing of Tower, it allowed me to be a bit more adventurous with my purchaces. I tooks some risks, and I didn't have many regrets.

This I think, and HOPE, is the most important thing that should come out of the Tower closure: the market BOUGHT almost everything in time, in some cases because it was "bargain shopping", but for the more famous stuff, merely because it showed what the REAL price point should be. People *may* feel justified in paying $18.99 for the album of the latest "hit", but they certainly don't feel justified paying that for something that's 40+ years old (the Beatles) or even 30+ (Pink Floyd), or even 20+ (U2). And that's just for the "biggest" albums of those decades. Tower may have had prices too high before, but everybody else aside from Best Buy *matched* those prices. Best Buy, like CostCo and Walmart, lower prices but in spite of their size, they greatly reduce selection to the point of saturation. Everybody who was willing to pay the higher price has already done so - time to lower the price or the product doesn't move and the business suffers.

I didn't take many risks except in the classical market (mostly good aside from one or two that were old mono recordings but not labeled as such).

Generally I got things I used to have on vinyl or cassette, like a LOT of 80s best-ofs that I didn't feel justified paying $18 or even $12 (the price I'd paid for the tape all those years ago), but did feel justified paying $6.

Some popular things disappeared instantly, as a large block, at a certain price point but that might be ebay-based resellers looking for a profit. Those three I mentioned, Beatles, Floyd, and U2 all disappeared at the 40%-off mark, the price at which an amazon reseller will make a profit if they go with what was 35% of the Tower price.

In my opinion, those are still overpriced, even on-line.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the things I will miss about Tower is the 7.99/9.99/11.99 sales on catalog titles. Course some great catalog titles never made this sale, but I was able to fill a lot of blanks with this.

The nice thing about my tastes being somewhat off of mainstream is that there still was good stuff for me to buy even at 70% off. Course, I was amazed at how long some mainstream stuff did stick around. Part of it was a lot of stock.

But I did pass on a lot of items that even with the discout were too expensive. When Iron Maiden's "Piece Of Mind" was going for a list of 19.99, it probably would have taken the 70% off just to make it reasonable. Course, it was gone before then.

[supergoober.livejournal.com]

My personal experience has been the opposite of this. I loved nothing better than to scour the record store bins when I was younger, but I stopped doing that as my time and money became tied up by other things. Switching to the iPod and online music stores has allowed me to search for new music more obsessively than I have in years. The "search" function on iTunes is AWESOME, and you can search for keywords, artists, artists that sound like other artists, genres, dates, etc., and the long list of options that comes up is not unlike a record store bin except that you can double click on every song and hear a piece. I've discovered more new bands in the past year than I had in the past 5 years previous. Online music stores are not perfect (hard to find stuff remains hard to find, and for no good reason that I can think of), but it's the future, and I'm excited about it.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends on what you're after.

In the prog-rock world (where many labels like Inside Out aren't on iTunes) and in the classical world (where the downloads are inferior to the cd and noticeably so to the audiophile), the death of the cd store is devestating.

For the mainstream (whatever that happens to be at the time) and whatever close relatives it has (modern rock is just modern rock; i hear very little differences these days) iTunes is the obvious way to go.

But for the Niche, the one trying to escape that to music that is deeper and richer, to their minds (and i'll be honest, mine as well), iTunes simply doesn't have enough and shows no sign that it ever will.

Granted, with my prog-rock collection, I grew the tendency not to go to iTunes but to at least buy cds directly from the artist's own website, but there were still occasions where that impulse buy would happen.

iTunes simply doesn't satisfy my "impulse buy" nature. never has and i've surfed it dozens of times. all that sticks out is all that i already know and likely already have.

THEN you add in the amount of work needed to make a copy i can play on other media (and knowing that *technically* such actions are, while within the old copyright law definition of fair use, illegal under the DMCA), and it's just nuts.

Celtic, other European folk, Prog-rock, 80s archives (though splurging at Towers' demise and i could program XM's "80s on 8" for months without a repeat), movie scores, and classical. all of those are *grossly* under-kept on any downloads-based store and the audio quality difference between the download and the cd is enough for me to not bother.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

then there's my constant rant i've had for 5 years now: the online stores are still only selling that which is in print on CD.

iTunes is ok for selling that, but would be better utilized for selling out of print stuff where the cost of putting it back into print makes it prohibitive but the cost to throw it up online makes it almost instant profit even at low sales numbers.

but the labels don't care. to them, their product is either for sale everywhere or it isn't, and that's ignorant and stupid.