The last music score in Callie, Rock Out, is now closed. The owner took a job at the university and there were no buyers. Another store in the downtown area is now vacant.
Living where I do, this isn’t the sort of thing that can be blamed on Walmart. Amazon (and Apple) yes, Walmart no. In at least one sense, it’s a triumph for capitalism that places like this were made unnecessary. Yet I remember when I first got here, the fact that it had a record store was a positive.
Despite the fact I knew that I would never step foot in it. Taking the above picture is literally the first and only time that I did.
Shortly after moving out here, we signed up for Amazon Prime. Though it couldn’t be justified purely in terms of dollars and cents (since we’d be getting free shipping anyway due to order size), it’s made us less reliant on what’s local. To our benefit, to Rock Out’s and bookstores’ peril.
We are in a relatively unique situation, in that most of the big box stores are over an hour away. We have a (non-Supercenter) Walmart-ish place in town (without the Everyday Low Prices), but most of our shopping has to be an hour away or two.
I do wonder, though, about what the future holds in the event of ever-increasing gas prices. The answer for many is unflinchingly increased density and the like. This has to do with personal transportation, but the outlook is considered dour for both the big box stores (often in the suburbs, often requiring a drive to get there) and shipping.
For a variety of reasons, I see Walmart and other one-stop shopping places actually weathering the storm reasonably well. Higher gas prices mean fewer trips. Fewer trips mean economizing each trip. One trip to Walmart can take care of a lot of needs. I’m less sure about the more specialized Big Box stores.
I do think it spells trouble for the Rock Outs of the world, though, even if like RO they are centrally located downtown. If I’m going to go shopping, and I’m at all worried about gas prices, I am more likely to go to a place that I know is likely to have what I need. It’s harder for smaller stores to have such inventory management.
I also, ironically enough, see a place in all of this for Amazon and the like. Going door-to-door has its advantages. It is more gas economical to deliver four things on a cove of eight houses than it is for those four people to individually go out and shop.
The biggest question for places like Amazon, and indeed postal and parcel delivery services more generally, has to do with delivery times. To be economical, it might start making more sense for house-to-house deliveries to be less-than-daily. On the other hand, since that wouldn’t work for time-sensitive items, maybe not. It mostly comes down to where they are already going and when, and how important it is to get there with what frequency.
Rising gas prices – whether due to scarcity, industry profits, taxes, or whatever else – would definitely take a toll somewhere. America, a place of extraordinary inexpensiveness by first-world standards, will become more expensive. Places like Callie will be hit harder than others. It will be interesting to see where the sacrifices are made. Or, more importantly, who will be carrying the bulk of it. I am skeptical that it will be successfully laid at the doorstep of those The Smart Set thinks ain’t livin’ right.
I think record stores are largely dead even in dense and large cities.
As far as I can tell, two types of record/music stores exist in San Francisco
1. Ameoba and Rasputin. These are large local chains (though Ameoba has one store in LA) that specialize largely in used CDs/Records/DVDs. Ameoba also has a lot of live events and a part time business in being a less jerky version of the guys from High Fidelity. I.e., they try to turn people on to new music. Both stores also work hard to cultivate a sentimental attachment as a viable and needed part to the Bay Area.
2. Niche stores that largely deal in vinyl.
In big cities, individual retailers still generally do fine. A lot of local bookstores have found ways to survive even the not-used bookstores. Clothing shops can be non-chain because that way they can cater to local tastes and trends.
Record stores are going the way of the dodo because most people (except purists) are fine with downloading their music and movies.
Amoeba is da bomb.
It makes me sad that record stores will largely be something I only tell my kids about.
probably eventually, but there will likely always be specialty shops who can merge local accommodations with distribution points. i presume the vinyl thing will chug along for a good long while. but it’ll never be the same. i wonder if people still even bother stealing cds to sell?
that said i haven’t been to other music in about three months. who has the time? i can tell my phone to get me flac files and, blammo, flac files appear – wirelessly – in a few minutes. money appears on the other end – though bandcamp needs to step up their mobile format game.
i can say to people “there’s magic happening in my pants” and not just be bragging.
Does New York have any decent record stores anymore?
Virgin is gone. Kim’s is gone. Tower is gone I think there is one place in my brother’s neighborhood of Williamsburg.
Other Music is small, but pretty great (full disclosure, a friend of mine does their web stuff).
I can tell you that a lot of people are already forgetting or don’t know vinyl.
My parents were holding a huge sale to downsize their place a few years ago and an 8 year old was there with his parents. He pointed at the record player and said “What’s that?”
A woman I know had a sweatshirt that said “33 1/3 Legend” or something like that. She asked me what it meant. However, she was not American so maybe 33 1/3 is a strictly US way of referring to LPs.
i speak of the people who would shop in specialty stores to begin with, not just random folk. random folk ain’t given a dang in a long time – and who can blame them? vinyl is a pain in the ass. ain’t no magic in your pants when you buy vinyl. (playing it is another story, sometimes)
“Does New York have any decent record stores anymore?”
fer rilla, gorilla.
– other music
– academy records (brooklyn location has better used deals)
– generation records for the used stuff in the basement and general nostalgia on my part
– co op 87 in greenpoint has some interesting stuff on the ambient/electro/house/commische tip
– sound fix is pretty good for indie rock stuff and stuff like sufjan stevens i.e. arch white dude music
– i like earwax on bedford though i realize why people don’t. again may be nostalgia.
i miss hospital records from back when. never been a huge prurient fan, though i do greatly dig the vatican shadows stuff. but if i needed something odd or hateful, they’d at least have something up my alley. the store it was in had some oddball vinyl too.
oh and halycon in dumbo. i played a few shows at their carroll gardens location many a year ago. very nice people.
In most larger places I’ve been, record stores have sort of merged with bookstores or electronic stores. In less large places (places not large enough to have a B&N or Best Buy), they’ve still be around. I think I assumed that they were still around in larger cities, but merely didn’t really see them.
We lost our last pure record store here in Louisville last year. Sad, but not unexpected.
I agree the superstores (Walmart, Target, etc) will do fine. Sometimes I still need to go buy some random item at 11pm and Walmart is the best place to do so. Their hours alone will mean they keep my business. For the stuff I can wait on, we love Amazon Prime.
In other news, most cities lack stores vending horses and buggies.
Teasing, but music has basically moved to the MP3 player (and the phone) and internet. I would guess that whether a town has a record store is determined more by the people who want records at all than the competition of the local store with other sources of records. My hometown of Victoria has two record stores.
Ah, I don’t know. I worry about the end of record stores a lot, but find that the people who are most sure of it’s inevitability tend not to be huge music fans anyway. Also, I think it depends a lot on where you are. I live in a fairly small city with a thriving arts community and cheap rents. So, our eight record stores are thriving after a temporary lull. The record chains all went bust, but the local stores had a real advantage in knowing the local music community and connecting with it through things like in-store shows and hiring friendly music fanatics. Honestly, most music fans I know do not want to get in, buy what they need, and leave- they want someone to turn them on to their next musical fix that they hadn’t heard of. Amazon sucks at doing that, but the good record stores are great at it. My favorite local stores all greet me with, “Rufus! You gotta listen to this record we just got in! You’re gonna love it!” The chain stores were absolutely abysmal at doing that, of course, and Amazon fails totally at it, although their codes keep trying.
Another interesting thing- most of the local stores have gradually phased out their supply of CDs and beefed up their stock of vinyl. I think it has to do with the sort of people who come out and buy music in stores. I know that I haven’t bought a CD in years.
I’ve been meaning to comment on this, but it is utterly astonishing to me how bad Amazon is at this. If I buy a regional outlaw country album, do they recommend another artist coming from the same scene or do they recommend some Top 40 Nashville artist? The latter, of course. Or alternately they recommend an album I have already purchased… from them! They ought to have an option below everything they mention saying “I already own this” and that way, even if I purchased it from somewhere else, they can put it in the database and have a better idea of what I like.
Glyph mentions this below, but Pandora is much better about this. Without much effort, even, Rhapsody was helpful in finding new music. Amazon, which should be great at this, is terrible at this.
Awesome comment.
We’ve such a store here. When CD sales started dipping, they turned to movies, again catering to local customer tastes. Then to used vinyl/CDs; great deals of trading in so many to get one free. And then they expanded into comics.
And they’re opening new locations as appropriate footprints open up. Crossroad spots — existing malls, etc., or main streets with a lot of foot traffic, existing pad that doesn’t require much retooling to keep costs down, and staffed by the local hipsters who seem to best comprehend the local aesthetic.
Also, a whole lot of shelf space spent on the recordings and merch of local bands, the bands that play the bars around town.
when was the ordinance banning record store chains passed? 🙂
I hate emoticons.
🙁
Dhex,
I laughed.
Zic,
Why do you hate emoticons? I find them useful to convey tone sometimes.
New Dealer, tone, in good writing, comes with the words. Emoticons are too often used to pretend harsh/cruel words are wink, wink, nudge, nudge, actually not meant to be harsh or cruel; to avoid owning causing discomfort. Lazy.
But I did have an emoticon to try, I’ve no idea if there’s a nifty graphic for it, I’m sure there is, but it expresses my feeling about emoticons nicely:
.!..
zic, the very fact that you use “wink wink, nudge nudge” in your example shows why they can be helpful.
Because in text, you can’t wink or nudge. Visual cues (body language or gestures) are lacking. Sonic (vocal or tone) cues are lacking. All these nuances cannot be conveyed in straight text – we can try as best we can, but, although text is hugely useful form communication, it is also extremely limited in bandwidth.
Moreover, comments are meant to be close to real-time – so while you want to take some time to make sure your words and tone are what you want, you are working on the fly to make all that happen – same on the receiving end – you don’t want to spend too much time having to resolve ambiguity; deliberate too long, and the convo may pass you by.
So in an essay or OP, emoticons don’t really belong; but in a combox they may be a necessary tool.
IRL, friends use sarcasm and razzing and teasing to say all kinds of things to friends (and to BOND them with friends) that would be pretty jerky if said to strangers, or even to the friends, outside of the proper context or without the right nuance or tone.
And yeah, sometimes people use emoticons dishonestly to mask their intention – but people also smile and try to pretend they were just joking when they meant to hurt someone IRL, so this human behavior is nothing specific to emoticons.
More helpfully, emoticons can be used to quickly help resolve that ambiguity (was the sender trying to make the receiver cry, or laugh?) in a positive way.
Glyph, all I can say is that dhex responded exactly as I hoped. Given our discussions on a previous post, my ‘hating’ had a bit more nuance; an ‘agree to disagree’ filled with grudging respect.
Emoticons, the salt in the comment boxes.
Oh the joy of progress.
(actually, strobing lights are also a migraine trigger, and those flashing little smiley faces are a bit discomforting for me. But so aren’t the lights in most stores, on police/safety vehicles, my car blinkers, and Christmas trees. Serious head trauma back in the day; flashing lights for some folk like me trigger slow-moving seizures through the brain. I suspect the lighting in many schools has much to do with educational outcomes, in work places much to do with productivity, but nobody wants to take me seriously.)
Ah, OK, I didn’t realize there was a history for you guys, sorry for jumping in.
Also: they flash on your end? On mine they either show up as regular keyboard characters, or sometimes they show up as a yellow smiley face/frowny face/winky face – but they are *always* static, they don’t flash or anything. Could there be something in your computer or browser settings somewhere that could turn that off?
RE: lighting and migraines – fluorescents do it bad. I think it is a combination of the wavelength (heavy on blue, which is a known migraine trigger) and slight flicker/strobe. When I was working from my office I was getting 1 or 2 migraines a month, easy. Now that I work from home, I am getting 1 or 2 a year.
i generally avoid them because they look dumb, but given that i already avoid proper capitalization some degree of softening formality is required.
they shouldn’t be flashing, though – is the refresh on your monitor set to something weird?
dhex, I’m tracking that down; most appear to be animated gif; looking for a blocker.
adblock plus if yer using firefox. just right click the image and choose the bottom option (on pc, not sure about macs)
they’re definitely not animated here – those things are crimes against humanity.
most music fans I know do not want to get in, buy what they need, and leave- they want someone to turn them on to their next musical fix that they hadn’t heard of. Amazon sucks at doing that
I had a discussion with a friend of mine a while back who was rhapsodizing about Pandora. I have conflicted feelings about Pandora (which I don’t really use, but many friends do). I pretty reliably enjoy Pandora whenever I am exposed to it, which picks out stuff it thinks you’ll like, based on what you’ve told it you like, and using actual musical attributes to identify similar stuff. It does a pretty good job – fire up that “Galaxie 500” channel, and you’ll like most of what you hear, and may even be exposed to a few new things along the way.
Amazon does something sort of similar, but more by factoring in what other purchasers of the same product have also purchased (and I am sure, things like record label and text descriptions), to predict what else you might like to buy.
But what Rufus gets at, and what worries me, is the loss of “noise” (in a statistical/”random” sense rather than a musical one) in these automated recommendation processes. I mean, even with a friend/fellow music fan/good record store clerk most of the recommendations are based on “you’ve told me what you like, so I will recommend this other thing that I think is similar, based on known attributes x, y and z” – but sometimes you get that total bolt-from-the-blue randomness of “this is like nothing I have ever heard, or you have heard – and you may absolutely hate it – but my god, you have GOT to hear this!”
And maybe you *will* hate it the first time. But on listen 2, or 3, or 20, it may end up knocking you sideways, and changing the whole world of what you thought was possible. You never knew you needed this, but now you do.
For this kind of “punctuated equilibrium”, passionate (sometimes crazy) fans are what are needed, not algorithms which get better and better at a “smoother” and predictable iterated evolutionary process.
My worry is that these automated processes are better at giving us what we want (comfort), but not as good at occasionally giving us what we need (surprise).
Does anybody else think there is anything to this? Or is this just another variant on the old “advancing technology risks making us more soulless & boring & homogenous” refrain?
Like, Nirvana (the band) could form today, and they would get played on the Pandora stations of people who had created Pandora stations for their predecessors Pixies or Replacements (or SY, or Wipers, or heck *maybe* even Boston or Beatles, depending on the savvy of the programs).
But Nirvana (as hugely popular cultural phenomenon, as the place where certain things crashed from musical underground to mainstream) might not happen today, because they would probably *not* get played on someone’s Guns & Roses Pandora station – there is no human driving that “crossover” process, no person to change their minds, and try to change the minds of other people.
If I tell a robot I like Thai food, if it’s an adaptable robot it might try to slip me some Vietnamese and some Chinese, but it’s probably not going to try to feed me Mexican – and maybe I’d love Mexican, if only I would try it; if only I knew it existed. For that, I need a push.
I am already dating myself with these musical references, so let’s hit one more – is one John Peel worth 1,000 highly-refined algorithms? Are we losing something (even if we gain more music on net) by giving up the flawed, human gatekeepers?
Can programs do zeitgeist?
I’ve felt this way somewhat ever since I stopped listening to the radio. I very rarely tripped across new artists at the record store. Post-radio, I did some listening to the local music scene and found a bunch of artists that way, expanding based on opening acts and name-checks and such. Since leaving the Gulf Coast, though, I haven’t done much in that regard. I discovered some new artists from Rhapsody, and then Pandora. The latter being the thing closest to replicating the radio experience. At the time, Pandora had a limited enough artist selection that they had to throw you some curveballs (that may still be true, I dunno).
I’m not sure I agree that there aren’t humans driving the process, though. The inputs are based on likes and dislikes, I think, a form of recommendation by breathers.
BUT, none of that really changes the repeated exposure sometimes that is required to get into something new. I think along these lines when it comes to albums on physical discs. The song I would like most after a few weeks wouldn’t be the song that jumps out at me at first. Today, with individual track downloads, would I even have it? Would I have listened to it enough to come around on it? I’m not so sure.
Of course, this is a bit of an irony with Rhapsody or Spotify. You have access to so much music that even if you do listen to it, you can move on and not look back. Being young and poor and dropping $15 on a CD dang well meant that I was going to listen to every track on that CD for at least a little while. Suck cost fallacy my arse. Now? Not so much. A function of age? Or a function of immediately available alternatives?
IIRC, Pandora is actually based on “rules” that were defined in advance (I am sure they are tweaked periodically) where they use actual musical attributes of your “seed” song or artist (BPM, melodic/harmonic characteristics, volume, rhythmic complexity) for the program to generate further similar choices from; and the individual user *then* uses the like / dislike function to get his personalized stream ever-more-tailored to his (already-extant) preferences.
While that is a highly successful strategy for producing a stream the listener will like, (because it started with something liked/known and iterates from there to similar choices, being brought back in line with the like/dislike button right away if it strays too far), it seems unlikely to throw the listener curveballs too often (not that radio ever did this either, but a record store for damn sure could).
So his preferences will never change, because he is rarely exposed to anything outside his extant preferences, which are reinforced.
It seems to have the potential to get kind of Ourobouros-y.
pandora is just way too much work to bother with.
that said, while i see where you’re coming from, but i don’t think the effect is actually felt. if anything, people are exposed to far more; more variety, more range, more – for lack of a better term – wackiness. now, this may end up being shallow or deep, but radio programming has been pretty robotic for a few decades now.
simon reynolds touches on this a bit in retromania (which i recommend); the depth of engagement is automatically limited because even just limiting oneself to one’s hard drive/phone/dap/etc even casual listeners can fit a few dozen hours worth in their pocket.
there may be many risks to an increasingly networked future – the destruction of the album sales market being the most obvious – but increasing homogenity is not one of them.
i mean, dang, i can be all CHECK OUT THIS NEW PIG DESTROYER ALBUM and in 3 seconds you’re all “yeah, no” but, like, that shit happened through space because of magic or something.
(foobar just informed me i have seven weeks, four days and seven hours worth of files on my pc. i’m only about 75% through ripping my cds to flac and maybe 15% through the vinyl. i could win the lottery and inherit a six foot wizard head bong and still never get all the way through that.)
“To be economical, it might start making more sense for house-to-house deliveries to be less-than-daily. On the other hand, since that wouldn’t work for time-sensitive items, maybe not.”
Couldn’t they just price for this? They sort of already do this. Amazon’s regular free delivery is 5-7 days or something. I wouldn’t be shocked if this is for the reason cited here: bulk deliveries. If you want something more immediately, you pay for it.
Actually if you look at ups or fed ex you find the cheapest delivery option is deliver to the local post office who then delivers to your mailbox. (There is little additional cost since the post office has to visit the mailbox every day). I don’t know if Amazon uses this yet however, always using the 2 day service.
I learned that recently, when a textbook my daughter has bought online disappeared. The shipper said that FedEx records showed it had been delivered, but they really only showed it getting to the post office.
This has happened to me a couple times now with Amazon deliveries. Luckily Amazon will replace/refund no problem, but it is annoying, the FedEx tracker just indicates when they successfully delivered it to the USPS, who promptly lost or stole it.
I’ve never had any trouble with stuff delivered by the USPS end-to-end; you can even track that online, just as with FedEx or UPS. Maybe FedEx just tosses it, knowing they can blame the damned inefficient Post Office.
Yeah, after I wrote that I realized it was unfair, the incompetence or scam could be on the FedEx end just as easily.
In a way that could work to their benefit – the final carrier, USPS, gets the blame from the customer. Maybe you’ll pay more for FedEx door to door next time.
Conveniently, “Empire Records” is on TV this morning.
Will anyone understand this movie in 10 years?
Do commercials and move trailers still use the “record scratch” sound effect to indicate surprise or faux-pas? How do kids understand what that is?
Or is that now just the equivalent to the sad trombone “wah-wahhhhh” effect – you don’t have to know what a trombone is, to understand the meaning, you just get it from context, esp. after you’ve heard it a few times?
Recently read a poem, a pastoral piece, reflecting on the nostalgia of disappearing farms. It referred to rolls of hay, as if they were something fading, not something new, without the awareness of ricks or bales.
The emotional nuance of sound/music often roots in the experience people have listening. The train whistle would have been meaningless to people 300 years ago. The purposeful digital glitch meaningless to people just 10 years ago. Art reflects the age in which its made. But the emotional responses certain types of sounds also root in the human condition; and people gifted enough to comprehend that emotional language, no matter if it’s a trombone wha or a guitar cry, a human voice wailing, or a drum trembling, speak directly to the listeners emotions. No emoticons needed.
I’ve had kids ask why digital cameras/phones make the shutter click noise. They ask if I can use my camera to make a phone call. Hand a kid a toy phone and he’ll start taking pictures with it.
By mere association, a number of these sounds will remain (how many turns of phrase are completely outdated?). So, yea, folks might equate ‘record scratch’ with surprise because they continue to see it associated that way.
But, yea, we’re confusing the fuck out of our kids.
RE: the shutter click noise on a digital camera – this might not quite be the right word, since it is a sound not a visual or tactile element, but that may be considered a skeuomorph, something of which Apple is/was quite fond (but Apple is not the only proponent, the concept is used on all sorts of physical and software objects).
Thanks for that term.
In early digital cameras, which were essentially range-fingers, it was because luddite users weren’t sure if they’d taken the picture. The click — the physical sound of the shutter opening and closing on a film camera — was the signal that the exposure had been completed, and it’s now okay to breath again.
took a lot of stress out of early digital photography.