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February 12, 2004
TT: Brick, mortar, and mp3s
A reader writes:Brick and mortar record stores don't strike me as an extinct species. Tower records, let it be known, is crap. They have a wide selection, but not deep: their buyers are uninformed even in independent pop music, which is extraordinarily popular ("underground" and "below the radar" would be misnomers). Not to mention their prices cannot even vaguely compete with Amazon, even with added shipping charges. However, on the west coast there are three Amoeba (two in SF, one in LA) independent record stores that have maybe ten or twenty times the selection of a typical Tower. Their prices are comparable, if not cheaper than Amazon, they sell used, new, import, vinyl, and a huge volume of ‘bargain' CDs. The store is always mobbed with people; you typically see individuals buying five to ten CDs at once. Amoeba serves the music fanatic market, which pretty much includes every "hipster" in the known universe, because staying abreast of independent music is the bedrock of hipster cultural sophistication. Knowing the hip bands gets you laid. There are a lot of hipsters in the big cities and they have a lot of money. I don't have access to Amoeba's books but they cannot be doing too poorly considering they just opened a new store. Perhaps we should stop looking at Tower records, which looked like a Dinosaur to anyone with any concern about pop music well before the advent of MP3s. I speak with some authority on this issue as my freshman year of college is the year that MP3 trading first became widespread (about a year before Napster).
Aye, there's the rub. Do small chains like Amoeba (which certainly sounds pretty fabulous to me) have a future? Or are they merely a "transitional technology," so to speak, destined to wither away as more and more artists begin marketing their music directly to the public via the Web? I think that's really the key question, and I think we'll all live to know the answer.
If I had any money to bet, I'd put it on the Web, but I spent it all on modern art prints, sigh....
Posted February 12, 2004 12:06 PM
