Demise of a Record Giant
Posted in Distribution, Industry on Jan 20th, 2010
If anyone didn’t know, many of the Virgin Records Mega stores have closed their doors after many years in business. At first, I was shocked that the store on Broadway in Manhattan shut its door. However, I was really shocked when I found out that the Orlando store located at Downtown Disney in Walt Disney World closed its doors I was utmost shocked and realized that the record resales have entered a new era, almost gone.
If we think back before the days of MP3 players and the Internet, the only place we could get the newest recordings from an artist were brick and mortar record stores like Virgin, Tower or Sam Goody. Based on my most current research, all three seem to be now gone. The only remnants of these giants are their online stores.
I remember growing up in the eighties and going to one of the major record stores and looking at all the endless racks that were filled with just about every artist that was current. And….there was a choice between the vinyl, CD or cassette. Eventually the cassettes died as portable CD players around and then came MP3 players. The rest is history. It is now sad to see what actually is stocked on the shelves at stores and those who work there are not even familiar with some of the artists that are requested by us seasoned die hard CD aficionados.
It truly is a shame to see the traditional record stores go by the way side of online. But, it is also sad to acknowledge that the acceptance of less fidelity is getting higher. We have lost the art of being able to truly listen to music and appreciate it in a non-personal player. Along with the sound, the ability to study the album inserts and cover art is also going away. Some of the excitement of buying a new album was in the digesting of the album notes and other documentation that came along with the album, regardless of the format.
I truly feel that an unjust movement in the music industry has transpired over the past decade. Not only have we lost giant businesses, but have lost the ability to appreciate the art for what it is in the larger sense of the matter. The unjust to live music has also sanctioned this demise of the music industry. I hope that at one point we do experience a renaissance in the old traditional sense of experiencing music and the various art forms which were once associated with the release of a new album.
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You make some good points but in some ways I’d like to object.
Cover art, album documentaries, if you really wanted to you could use modern technologies to just produce that. In fact, the quality could be some much better compared to a small booklet.
For example, you could create a high fidelity website containing audio material, video material, images of highest quality and so on. You could present those using top notch flash technology and intuitive ways of navigation. No booklet could come close to that except for being physical. You could even try to imitate a brick and mortar store by including the download button in such “booklet”-sites.
Of course the art of music seems to be fading away with quality becoming lower by the minute, but you can also state that new technology often is worse where the older technology is better and vice versa. The audio quality is worse (where the older is better) but the mobility is better (where the older is worse).
It’s also valid to question whether the old times always were better since, for example, the vinyl imho had a worse audio quality, let alone music cassettes. But that is a question of personal taste.