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September 6, 2006
TT: Serendipity revisited
A number of bloggers linked to the teaser to "Serendipity, R.I.P.," my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, without having read the whole thing. This extended excerpt may help to clear up the resulting confusion. The occasion for the column was the announcement that Tower Records is filing for bankruptcy:Imagine a world without record stores. What will it be like? How will it affect the way we experience music?
The biggest change will be in the way we shop. People who purchase music online typically come to a "store" looking for a specific song or album, buy it, then depart. People who purchase music at deep-catalog record stores, by contrast, typically spend a fair amount of time browsing, and thus are more likely to buy additional CDs on impulse--including some of whose existence they may not previously have been aware. Such serendipitous discoveries are a key aspect of the enduring appeal of brick-and-mortar retailing. The old joke about Strand Book Store, New York City's best-known seller of used books, was that while it never had the book you were looking for, you always went home with five others you couldn't resist. (The store's slogan is "18 miles of books.") I can't begin to count the number of good books I've bought at the Strand simply because they looked interesting.
On the other hand, I can't remember the last time I shopped at the Strand: I now buy most of my books and all my CDs online. Not only is it more convenient, but I can get exactly what I want, whenever I want it. What I can't do is wander up and down the aisles, casually running my eyes along the shelves in search of pleasant surprises. In cyberspace there are no aisles or shelves, just pages viewed one at a time.
Not only does online buying put an end to browsing, but it also eliminates the practice known to booksellers as "hand-selling." Think of Championship Vinyl, the fictional record store portrayed in the movie High Fidelity, whose know-it-all clerks ("Do we look like the kind of store that sells ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You'? Go to the mall") love to shower their customers with try-this-record-you'll-like-it advice. The good news is that smart online stores like amazon.com and Netflix are seeking to replace the personal touch of hand-selling with "preference engines" that automatically generate computerized lists of "other items you might enjoy" each time you make a purchase. That's a step in the right direction, as is Pandora, a free Web-based streaming-audio "radio station" whose programming is determined by the tastes of each individual user....
To be sure, none of these sophisticated tools is as elegant, or as soul-satisfying, as old-fashioned browsing. I've spent countless happy hours trolling the aisles of Tower Records in search of buried treasure. Yet when amazon.com and iTunes made it possible for me to buy any album I wanted without leaving my apartment, I didn't think twice about turning my back on Tower....
Is the narrowly targeted buying-on-demand facilitated by online stores creating a world in which consumers are less likely to try new things? Perhaps--but the infinitely deep catalogs of these stores also make it possible for the curious listener to range farther afield than ever before....
Subscribers to the Online Journal can read the complete column by going here.
I posted at length about Pandora back in May. To read what I wrote, go here.
Posted September 6, 2006 11:12 AM
