Another store bites the dust

[Frau_Blucher]

Merle's Record Rack, mid-shore Connecticut's only remaning independent is going out of business this Saturday. The two brothers who own it haved worked their since they were teenagers. They said they were competing just fine with the big labels and wealth of local clientele, but feel pretty strongly that internet piracy finally killed them. I suppose it's probably true.

For all the people, like some/many of us here, who use internet sharing to get exposure and actually buy stuff they really like, I guess there's folks to never buy a CD anymore. Or is that corporatized music just sucks and people are buying less material period? Or the e-commerce aspect of the internet, where online shopping for bargains and rarities outstrips what any cool independent store could do for you? I dunno, but it's a bummer. [V]

[obs]

Internet piracy plays a role, but it's not the only thing.

Obviously, used sales adds to the problem. Just look at EBay, for example. I buy more used CDs than new ones, simple because there's a lot of albums that aren't worth paying the full price for. Unlike vinyl, you can look at a CD and pretty much know that it's going to sound like new.

Another thing is that brick and mortor stores don't help themselves by stocking mostly CDs that every other place like Wal-Mart carry. For less popular stuff, I generally have to order it online, from places such as Amazon. Even if a B&M has it, it is sometimes priced so high that I would rather order it from online.

I don't know how they've done it, but a local indie store here has actually grown over the past ten years. Zulu Records has gone from being in a dumpy old shack to a newer building and then expanding into the area beside them, all without a webbased store (although they do have a website). They carry new/used cds/vinyl. I pretty much only buy used stuff there. The great thing about them is that instead of sitting on their used stock, they actually drop prices from time to time, if stuff sits there too long.
http://www.zulurecords.com

edit// had to fix a typo!

[MARV]

I was in a local CD shop one town over from me, last week. It happened to be the day he was closing up shop for good. The owner simply told me "Retail is a waste of time" when asked why he was closing. I looked around and saw that he was carrying pretty much only common, commercial material that could be had at Virgin, HMV or Best Buy for a few dollars less. He did have some 45's from the 50's behind glass and hanging on the wall but you can't have that be your only unique selling point, can you? When he opened a year and a half ago, I shook my head.

The specialist retailer does far better on the internet where overhead costs are significantly much lower, thus yielding a greater profit margin. I see it in the fashion industry also. Small retailers better have something that no one else does or else they should'nt even bother. With monstrous marketing budgets, endless wholesale buying muscle and tons of markdown money to spare, the giant chains steammroll over the mom & pops. Now with online retailers (and yes, that includes the giant chains) offering even better pricing and/or the convenience of door to door delivery, no tax surcharge and sometimes even free s&h, the little brick and mortar store is soon to be extinct. No surprises there. Sad, but eventually they'll be relics of a bygone era like the general store, the soda fountain or the full service gas station. The retail landscape is [i]always[/i] changing.

Now music downloading threatens anybody that sells music - not just the mom and pop b&m shops.....if they don't somehow embrace it. Because it'll never stop.

<a href="http://www.worldwildlife.org/cetaceans/index.cfm">I dig whales.</a>

[2Nu]

Wow, it's been many years (at least 7-8) since I've set foot in an actual brick & mortar record shop.

Back in the 80's I used to frequent this great LI record store called Titus Oaks. They had a location on Rte 110 and Wolf Hill road and another one in an Old Wetsons burger joint on Old Country Road in East Meadow.

What great places to go rummaging through countless used record & CD bins. Like so many other mom & pop stores, they eventually shuttered one location (Huntington) then later moved from the East Meadow location to Westbury under a new name (The Music Box- I believe) in what was once the Century 21 shopping center on Old Country Road.

I kept going there to buy and trade in used vinyl and CDs up until the late 90's. Around that time I also discovered another great store- Empire Discs on Stewart Ave and went there a number of times for vinyl/CD purchases and trades.

The last store I frequented was CD Warehouse in Rockville Centre. That place is still there but I haven't bought a CD there in at least 5 years.

It's truly sad that these independant operators couldn't sustain profitability in the face of all the corporate retail outlets and point & click instant cyber music providers (legit and otherwise).

I agree, it's inevitable that small independant brick & mortar music establishments will soon be gone the way of VHS video stores and soda fountain ice cream shops of years past.[V]

<IMG SRC="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v395/richp62/Icons%20Avatars/inot.gif">
"Talking With People That Agree With You Is Like Jogging In A Cul-de-sac" - Bill Moyers

[bpdp3]

To me, there is NOTHING like the experience of walking into a good record store....be it for used vinyl, CD's or new vinyl releases. It is as vital to the "new wave music listening experience" as actually listening to the music. Nothing like losing yourself in a record store.

It's tougher with wife and kids now, but if given the opportunity, the 1st thing I do when in a new city is go to the yellow pages and look for the record stores and plan out a map. It's like going "on a mission" - -

I won't bemoan the internet, although I have to admit mp3's are very - - well, just blah to me. I like the visual that goes with the audio. I like to hold that little black record and read those liner notes and see what they came up with for a cover. HOLD IT IN MY HANDS, not look at it on a screen. Same goes for the 'visual experience' of going into an indie record store.

Sorry to hear about this store, Blir. Sadly, as a committed vinyl geek, I see it happen all the time. And there are just not too many (if any) new stores in that vein opening to take their place. But as much as I hate it, I know it has to happen. This is evolution in how we as a society treat music now. You can't deny the technological ability we have (kind of like arguing stem-cell research or genetic engineering (?)). For the 'average joe', it's just too damned easy, affordable and convenient to download music instead of searching for it in a messy record store.

[randy]

Hell--just pop over to RI. Lukes still going strong but showing signs of age. Great basement of old vinyl!!

[MARV]

Here's an interesting article taken from the front page of the recent New York Times' Sunday Styles section entitled, "The Graying of the Record Store". Man, their website does make things convenient - I was all set to start scanning, cropping, rotating and uploading to Photobucket [}:)] [;)]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/fashi ... ref=slogin

You need to pay to read articles overr a week old so here's the text in case anyone wants to read it beyond the next few days:

On a recent Monday, six people — soon enough four, then two — were browsing the bins of compact discs at Norman’s Sound and Vision, a music store on Cooper Square in Manhattan, around 6 p.m., a time that once constituted the daily rush hour. A decade ago, the number of shoppers might have been 20 or 30, said Norman Isaacs, the owner. Six people? He would have had that many working in the store.

“I used to make more in a day than I probably make in a week now,” said the shaven-headed Mr. Isaacs, 59, whose largely empty aisles brimming with punk, jazz, Latin music, and lots and lots of classic rock have left him, many afternoons, looking like a rock ’n’ roll version of the Maytag repairman. Just as troubling to Mr. Isaacs is the age of his clientele.

“It’s much grayer,” he said mournfully.

The neighborhood record store was once a clubhouse for teenagers, a place to escape parents, burn allowances and absorb the latest trends in fashion as well as music. But these days it is fast becoming a temple of nostalgia for shoppers old enough to remember “Frampton Comes Alive!’’

In the era of iTunes and MySpace, the customer base that still thinks of recorded music as a physical commodity (that is, a CD), as opposed to a digital file to be downloaded, is shrinking and aging, further imperiling record stores already under pressure from mass-market discounters like Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

The bite that downloading has taken out of CD sales is well known — the compact disc market fell about 25 percent between 1999 and 2005, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization. What that precipitous drop indicated by the figures doesn’t reveal is that this trend is turning many record stores into haunts for the gray-ponytail set. This is especially true of big-city stores that stock a wider range of music than the blockbuster acts.

“We don’t see the kids anymore,” said Thom Spennato, who owns Sound Track, a cozy store on busy Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “That 12-to-15-year-old market, that’s what’s missing the last couple of years.”

Without that generation of buyers, the future looks bleak. “My landlord asked me if I wanted another 10-year lease, and I said no,” Mr. Spennato said. “I have four years left, then I’m out.”

Since late 2003, about 900 independent record stores have closed nationwide, leaving about 2,700, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a marketing research company in Studio City, Calif. In 2004, Tower Records, one of the nation’s largest chains, filed for bankruptcy protection.

Greta Perr, an owner of Future Legends, a new and used CD store on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, said that young people never really came back to her store after the Napster file-sharing upheaval of the late 90’s; she has responded by filling her windows with artists like Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. “People come in and say: ‘I remember when I was 20, Steve Miller’s second record came out. Can I get that?’ ” she said.

Industry statistics bear out the graying of the CD-buying public. Purchases by shoppers between ages 15 and 19 represented 12 percent of recorded music in 2005, a decline from about 17 percent in 1996, according to the Recording Industry Association. Purchases by those 20 to 24 represented less than 13 percent in 2005, down from about 15 percent. Over the same period, the share of recorded music bought by adults over 45 rose to 25.5 percent, from 15 percent.

(The figures include CD’s and downloaded songs, with CD’s still an overwhelming share of the market in recorded music, 87 percent, in 2005.)

The dominance of older buyers is especially evident at smaller independent stores in metropolitan areas, where younger consumers tend to be more tech-oriented and older music fans tend to be more esoteric in their tastes, said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm.

At Norman’s, which is 15 years old and just around the corner from New York’s epicenter of punk, St. Marks Place, shoppers with nose rings and dewy cheeks are not unknown. But they may only be looking to use the automatic teller machine. A pair of teenagers — he with ink-black dyed hair, and she in ragged camouflage shorts — wandered in one evening recently and promptly froze in the doorway, stopped in their tracks by an Isaac Hayes cut from the 70’s.

They had the confused looks of would-be congregants who had stumbled into a church of the wrong denomination; they quickly shuffled off. Most of Norman’s other customers were old enough to remember eight-track tapes. Steven Russo, 53, for instance, was looking for jazz CD’s. Mr. Russo, a high school teacher in Valley Stream, N.Y., said that he values the store for its sense of camaraderie among cognoscenti as much as its selection. “It’s the ability of people to talk to people about the music, to talk to personnel who are knowledgeable,” he said.

Richard Antone, a freelance writer from Newark whose hair was flecked with silver curls, said his weekly trip to the store is a visual experience as well as an auditory one. “I remember how people admired the artwork on an album like ‘Electric Ladyland’ or ‘Sgt. Pepper’ as much as the music,” he said.

The lost generation of young shoppers — for whom a CD is a silvery disc on which you burn your own songs and then label with a black marker — will probably spell doom for Norman’s within the next five years, said Mr. Isaacs, the owner. Several of his downtown competitors have already disappeared, he said.

Some independent owners are resisting the demographic challenges. Eric Levin, 36, who owns three Criminal Records stores in Atlanta and oversees a trade group called the Alliance of Independent Media Stores, representing 30 shops nationally, said that businesses losing young customers are “dinosaurs” that have done nothing to cater to the new generation. Around the country, he said, shops like Grimey’s in Nashville, Shake It Records in Cincinnati and Other Music in New York are hanging on to young customers by evolving into one-stop hipster emporiums. Besides selling obscure CD’s and even vinyl records, many have diversified into comic books, Japanese robot toys and clothing. Some have opened adjoining nightclubs or, in Mr. Levin’s case, coffee shops.

“Kids don’t have to go to the record store like earlier generations,” Mr. Levin said. “You have to make them want to. You have to make it an event.”

But diversification is not always an option for smaller stores with little extra space, like Norman’s. Mr. Isaacs’s continued survival is due in part to a side business he runs selling used CD’s on Amazon and eBay. He buys them from walk-in customers who are often dumping entire collections.

Unlike the threatened independent bookstore, with its tattered rugs, dusty shelves and shedding cats, indie record stores in danger of disappearing do not inspire much hand-wringing, perhaps because they are not as celebrated in popular imagination as the quaint bookshop. (Record geeks can claim only “High Fidelity,’’ the book and movie, as a nostalgic touchstone.)

Still, the passing of such places would be mourned.

Danny Fields, the Ramones’ first manager, points out that visiting Bleecker Bob’s on West Third Street in the late 70’s was “like experiencing the New York music scene” in miniature — it was a cultural locus, a trading post for all the latest punk trends. “Dropping into Bleecker Bob’s was like dropping into CBGB’s,” he said. (You can still drop into Bleecker Bob’s.)

Dave Marsh, the rock critic and author of books on popular music, noted that rockers like Jonathan Richman and Iggy Pop honed their edgy musical tastes working as record store clerks.

“It’s part of the transmission of music,” said Mr. Marsh, who recalls being turned on to cult bands like the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention by the clerks at his local record store in his hometown, Waterford, Mich. “It seems like you can’t have a neighborhood without them.”

<a href="http://www.worldwildlife.org/cetaceans/index.cfm">I dig whales.</a>

[Grunch]

I admit I find most of my stuff via the internet, but I agree, nothing can replace the love of flipping through racks and racks of CD's and vinyl, with the anticipation of what lies behind the next record or disc. The feel and sound of flipping through endless rows of music is part of the experience. I still get my fix a few times each month. Still, I must admit many of the obscurities I sought over the past ten years were mostly found on line or at conventions. Still consider record conventions to be MY Christmas morning. The thrill of the hunt in music.....

[Ollie Stench]

There's rumors going around that Aardvark Records in NE Minneapolis is closing their doors soon. That leaves Treehouse and Road Runner as the only 2 indie record stores in town. Extreme Noise is still going, but they are a punk rock record store co-op and pretty much only handle punk and hardcore. Electric Fetus is still going strong but they are 99% new cds, kind of like an indie Tower Records. And there's always Cheapo, but they are a small chain.

[highway1pch]

I just posted about Noise Noise Noise in Costa Mesa, CA:

http://www.nwoutpost.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14336

<a href="http://www.ocnewwave.blogspot.com/"><font color="#ff6600"><font size=+1.5>OC New Wave Blog</font></a>
<font color="#00ff00"><font="westminster">Music videos, Orange County concerts, and more.</font>

[googoomuc]

Well I have to say that now most of my music comes from p2p or bit torrent.I do buy music (alot of it),but that is also from online shopping,mostly from amazon.From time to time I go to Amoeba Records here in San Francisco.Its one of the best used/new indie music stores I have been into. Its huge,with tons of hours looking till my eyes bleed.My mind always go blank when I enter a music store.I cant remember what I came in there for,I always have a list in my head,and then hit erase,it goes blank till I spend a half hour flipping through cds.
Fridays after work, when I lived in NYC I would go and get NME and go music shopping at Sounds in St. Marks, Rocks in your Head and Bleaker Bobs.(82-90)
Its sad that most of these indie stores and becoming dinasours,they are great places to meet others into music.
But with the web and sites like this I now have a place to find my old faves and meet great people into who are into music as much as I am.