The record shop – an endangered species
Wed 2nd June 2010
In the first of his series exploring trends in today’s music world, Philip Clark laments the decline of the high street specialist music store
Music to manikins: a London record store finds a new role
Keeping the flame burning: the West End's Harold Moores
Out East: listen, read, think, discuss at Rough Trade
When did you first suspect that record shops might be sinking in the uncharted waters of digital downloads, online sales and the stack ‘em high-flog ‘em cheap attitude of supermarkets who, actually, couldn’t care less about music?
Was it when, one day, your friendly high-street independent record shop wasn’t there? When your local branch of HMV did away with their dedicated classical, folk and jazz sections, re-branding as “specialist music” anything not pop? With Tower Records’ crash-and-burn, followed by the downfall of the Virgin/Zavvi high street shops? Was it when “Amazon.co.uk” became the most ubiquitous entry on your credit card statement, transactions that, ten years ago, you’d have necessarily made over the counter?
I had my own epiphany in New York a couple of years ago. “So why are you moving premises?” I asked Bruce Lee Gallanter, proprietor of Downtown Music Gallery, the CD shop in New York for contemporary jazz, avant-rock, free improvisation and contemporary composition. After two decades of operating from a shop on The Bowery, DMG were now being forced to relocate. “Look over the road at where CBGBs used to be [the legendary rock/punk club, which closed in 2008, where bands like Blondie, The Ramones and Television were discovered],” he told me. “It’s now a clothing store selling T-shirts for $250. Rents have rocketed and we just can’t compete.” And as two thriving artistic institutions, telling us things about the world we didn’t know, were snuffed out by a boutique selling pointless designer vanity-wear, little wonder Cheetah Chrome, guitarist in another CBGBs regular, The Dead Boys, claimed: “Manhattan just lost its soul to the money lords.” To misquote Gore Vidal: whenever I see a record (or indeed book) store taken over by a clothes shop, a little part of me dies.
When I started visiting New York regularly in the early 2000s, choice for the serious-minded music collector was overwhelming. Although CD sales for classical music were in a steady descent before downloading, Tower Records and Virgin were still flourishing, selling discs not easily available in the UK. Meanwhile shops like DMG, the Jazz Record Centre and Academy Records & CDs (second-hand classical CD nirvana) were where you went to dive deeper inside niche labels. How quickly things change. Today not a single big name, chain record store exists in New York City. DMG, thankfully, hung on by taking basement premises in China Town and expanding their mail order catalogue. The legendary Record Shack in Harlem was less fortunate. It’s still business as usual at both JRC and Academy, but if the money lords muscle into their patch too, who knows?
New York record stores are sneezing – will UK shops inevitably catch cold? And if all our record shops did disappear would anybody really care?
Why should anyone care? Isn’t sentimentality over what, when all said and done, are just retail outlets wasted? Amazon does the job just as well. You don’t even need to leave your living room! And my credit card is as stuffed as anybody else’s with purchases from Amazon.
