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February 11, 2004
TT: Through a glass, very darkly
Tower Records has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. No surprise there, but here's something from the New York Times's story that caught my eye:"The future looks particularly grim for all land-based music retailers,'' said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a consulting firm that has worked with retailers and record companies. He said such stores "literally have a toe-tag on them and they're boxed up for the proverbial boneyard.''
With the demise of once dominant stores like Tower that specialize in selling every category of music and do it with great depth and range, Mr. Flickinger predicted that "most consumers will move to a much narrower band of music - what they hear of the top 25 songs that are programmed in vicious rotation by the FM radio stations or top 20 almost preselected MTV songs.''
Excuse me? I think the first half of Mr. Flickinger's prediction is on the nose, but aliens from outer space must have taken over his brain thereafter. Those consumers who are content to listen exclusively to the Top 25 are already listening exclusively to the Top 25, and no record store, bankrupt or not, will widen their cramped horizons. Everybody else is looking to the Web to buy (and sell) their music, or soon will be.
Apropos of the Tower Records announcement, a reader wrote yesterday to ask what I thought the best classical-music stores in New York were. I told him I almost never bought CDs of any kind in stores anymore--I buy on line. The next step, which is nigh, is for people like me to stop buying CDs altogether and instead switch to downloading. Once that happens, the economic basis for the recording industry as it's presently constituted will disintegrate, and with it the industry.
A number of smart musicians who've had it up to here with the music business are already starting to experiment with their own Web-based "labels." To get a sense of how that will work, look at Maria Schneider's Web site, which makes use of new technology developed by a company called ArtistShare. That's the future of recording--maybe not for Beyoncé, but for all those artists who make music too interesting to crack the Top 25.
In the short run, we're in for a hell of a rough ride. After that, the fun starts. In the meantime, start downloading, if you're not doing it already. The bugs aren't completely worked out yet (especially with regard to classical music), but they will be, soon.
Posted February 11, 2004 12:00 PM
