Sasha Frere-Jones has set off a small wave of experiences in record stores inspired by an article in the NY Times called ‘The graying of the record store’.
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. [NY Times]
and from SFJ
I made friends hanging out at record stores. I enjoyed my bazillion hours of solitary digging. But for many, many people, record stores are the worst thing that ever happened to music. The people who work in them, give or take an educating angel, are terrifying. Even if you spend most of your waking hours hanging around and bonding with asshole clerks, your reward for this investment of time is receiving a treatment only slightly less hideous than that given to every other customer, all of them impossibly stupid and retrograde in the eyes of the employees. Working at a record store turns perfectly lovely people into misanthropic turds. I hated asking for music on my birthday because I knew my mother would have to go, without armor, into a shop where someone would be unnecessarily mean to her. I also suspected that this act of minor sadism would be the clerk’s primary form of joy during the work day.
The decline of the record store is something I have been thinking about for over a decade now. I grew up in record stores as a teenager – Metropolis, Waterfront, and Red Eye in Sydney. These stores were singlehandedly responsible for the noise I consider to be music nowadays. Their staff became familiar faces to me, some of them later close friends, and much of my youthful disposable income went through their tills.
I helped out behind the scenes at Red Eye for a short while in 1991/2, unstickering thousands of second hand CDs brought back from the USA on a ‘shopping trip’ by the owners. These all had to unstickered, cleaned up with some probably toxic cleaner, and then repriced according to an arcane price conversion system. Vinyl had to be carefully shrinkwrapped with a hairdryer. Every so often these mad middle aged Prince and Madonna collectors would pop in on their lunchbreaks from their office jobs and be ushered ‘out the back’ to examine the ‘rarities’ that had just been shrinkwrapped. For a while I coveted the mythical record store clerk job but I was firmly ensconced in the superior pay rates of selling children’s shoes whilst at uni. By 1994 I was selling books, videos and CDs at the ABC Shop which meant I had to deal with people asking for recommendations of classical, jazz and childrens CDs. I had a great deal of fun recommending what I thought were the more interesting bits of the catalogue – for example Australian soundtrack/ambient composer Peter Miller‘s The Violet Flame CD to people who were looking for ‘ambient’s music (meaning whale and dolphin sounds).
But it was the dance music specialists as I became interested in buying music to DJ with. Disco City, Reachin, Central Station – these all introduced me to other music, but it was eventually these that turned me away from record shopping.
Dance music for me meant a whole different record shopping experience.
Exclusive-ness became the most sought after trait, shopping as a DJ. The point of difference between you and other DJs was in your selections, and as a result dance music shopping in the early 90s especially was cut throat. Stores would order limited stock of highly desirable records in order to keep supply down and demand up – allowing prices to remain at profitable levels (if you were running a store that catered primarily for DJs then you couldn’t rely on the bread and butter releases that even indie stores could).
I have fond memories of the crush that would occur at Disco City on ‘shipment days’ in 1991/2. DJs would hang out at the store all day, waiting for the courier to arrive, and then the staff to unpack and price the stock. Once it emerged from the storeroom there was an all in brawl as everybody crowded around grabbing at the everything in sight.
Nowadays, these are just quaint memories.
In 1995 I had a run in with the staff at Central Station. It revolved around a Black Dog or Plaid record and my inability to accept that record store staff might artificially reduce supply (by holding records aside under the counter – for the coolest customers only). It probably didn’t help that those doing the holding aside were DJs themselves and thus were able to effectively hold a monopoly on particular sounds/genres/styles which they played by making it difficult for other DJs to buy ‘their’ records.
After that I stopped shopping at record stores until the new millenium.
Luckily, being a music writer and radio show producer, I was able to avoid shops and deal directly with distributors and labels instead. The first time I got inside a distributor’s warehouse would have been around 1994 when I visited Shock Records in Melbourne. It was amazing – all these records and CDs – some extremely scarce, rare and hard to find – just sitting there – waiting for some record store to order them. Maybe it was this, and other experiences, that made me so irritated by the artificial monopolies and cartels that ended up dominating the DJ scene in the 90s.
At the same time, though, I was developing theories of subcultural infrastructure as part of some research.
Record stores fulfilled a much larger function that just selling records. As SFJ points out they were meeting places. And as meeting places, in Sydney, record stores functioned as very effective subcultural information points. Many underground events that could never afford to promote using the scattergun/untargeted approach of street press advertising effectively used stores as flyer drops. It was much more than that, but record stores formed an integral part of a subcultural ecosystem.
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Nowadays this ecosystem is replaced with other means of promotion for events and artists, and the social networking functions of the record store as a location have been replaced, in part by communication networks. Danah Boyd‘s work on MySpace is interesting in that regard [there you go, can I ever escape from my day job?!].
So what exactly are teens _doing_ on MySpace? Simple: they’re hanging out. Of course, ask any teen what they’re _doing_ with their friends in general; they’ll most likely shrug their shoulders and respond nonchalantly with “just hanging out.” Although adults often perceive hanging out to be wasted time, it is how youth get socialized into peer groups. Hanging out amongst friends allows teens to build relationships and stay connected. Much of what is shared between youth is culture – fashion, music, media. The rest is simply presence. This is important in the development of a social worldview.
For many teens, hanging out has moved online. Teens chat on IM for hours, mostly keeping each other company and sharing entertaining cultural tidbits from the web and thoughts of the day. The same is true on MySpace, only in a much more public way. MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain “full-time always-on intimate communities” [4] where they keep their friends close even when they’re physically separated. Such ongoing intimacy and shared cultural context allows youth to solidify their social groups.
The function of record stores as recommendation engines is being replaced in the online environment. Projects like Last.FM offer both social networking AND recommendations – not by someone who is trying to make power plays with their cultural capital – but by your friends, albeit mediated by technology.
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Technological mediation offers much to the consumer – a uniform, easy, painless experience; no judgement when you order things like Fuzzy Felt Folk; and the range available trumps even the biggest specialist stores (well, maybe not Amoeba in SF)..
But it also takes away.
It takes away from local scenes, local communities and overthrows these with a global scene – a great anonymous shopping mall of endless choice and low emotional investment.
And that’s even before file sharing.
