R.I.P. The Record Store

I was in a mall a couple of days ago and decided to peruse the HMV record (and I use that term loosely) store. One of the pleasures of mall shopping, for me, is spending time in a record store. In the halcyon days of vinyl records, there were usually two or sometimes three record stores in a mall, depending on the size of the mall and I could spend a good couple of hours between them browsing the sale walls, the delete bins, and the catalogue product. Unfortunately, that activity has become something I fondly remember. With the decline of CD sales exacerbated by music downloading and the fact stores like WalMart and Costco heavily influence the market, record stores are fast going the way of the dodo. Extinct.

Of all the music retailers in Canada, HMV has survived while other chains such as Music World and Sam the Record Man have slid into music business oblivion. For HMV though, survival meant diversification. The stores sell more DVDs and video games than CDs. The inconvenient truth is, CDs are fast becoming obsolete although there are music geeks out there that, like me, prefer to have a tangible musical artefact not just a digital copy on an iPod or computer. And there are still "real" record stores around to serve us, Megatunes in Calgary comes to mind. 

It was inevitable that the retail music business would fall off once online stores like the Apple Store and eMusic came into being. Consumers like the convenience of buying one song as opposed to buying an entire album for one song. It's the digital version of the 45, plus online stores are fast. The music is instantly downloaded into your music reproduction device of choice. It's impulse buying at its finest. It doesn't say much for creative continuity though. Not all albums are just a collection of songs, some are cohesive works that must be appreciated in their entirety. Pink Floyd recognized this and recently sued their label EMI to stop selling individual tracks.

I miss the old record stores, but like a lot of other things, selling music has changed with the times. It's had to in order to survive. The old record store atmosphere can still be found in the smaller indie stores or the used-CD stores and there's always Amazon and Ebay for hard-to-find stuff. Eventually the record store will suffer the same fate as the drive-in movie theatre, the milkman, and the rotary dial telephone. And I hope that doesn't happen too soon.