http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1982434,00.html
Going off the record
All lovers of sound should be mourning the demise of America's last major music store
Martin Kettle Thursday January 4, 2007 The Guardian
A walk through Central Park is always one of the great pleasures of being in New York. The other day, though, I took a walk through the park with a difference - a walk that took me from the past to the future.
For many years, I've shopped at the huge Tower Records store just around the corner from the Lincoln Centre. The choice of music is amazing. I've spent more money on CDs there than in any other record store anywhere, not least because a favourable exchange rate makes a visit so irresistible.
I went to the store again on my recent visit to New York. But it will be the last time. Tower Records is going out of business. It has failed to adjust to internet sales and web downloading. Visiting the dying store is now a poignant affair. The shelves are all but empty, and a handful of shoppers sift through the remaining stock looking for a few final bargains.
The demise of Tower Records is a watershed moment for the sale of recorded music. From now on, no American city will have a large record store. And where New York leads, the rest of the world will surely follow. In Britain we still have similar outlets - mainly HMVs and Virgin Megastores - but the clock is ticking for them. I doubt there will still be a large record store in this country in a decade's time.
You can't buck the market, they say, and the market says get your recorded music online, whether by internet CD purchases or increasingly by downloads alone. The process is unstoppable. And as you walk across Central Park from the detritus of the record store that will never rise again, you get to Fifth Avenue and enter the fallen Tower's nemesis - the Apple Store.
The Apple Store is everything that Tower is not. It's light, friendly and fashionable. The design is cool and austere. There's not a lot to look at and almost nothing to browse. But the helpful staff circulate with advice about iPods and laptops - and that's enough. Hundreds of dollars-worth of merchandise change hands here every minute.
We all know by now about the gains to the listener: the iPod and its kin are incredibly handy, portable and personalised. But you don't have to be a grumpy old man to see that something is also being lost - and I'm not talking here about the solitariness of the iPod generation. That's another argument for another day.
I'm simply talking about the wonder of discovery. My generation learned an awful lot about music by browsing records in stores. It was both solitary and sociable. We learned in depth about bands and singers we'd not heard on the radio, that there were dozens of different recordings of this symphony or that sonata, and why this or that performer was better than the rest. And we learned in breadth too - as a teenager browsing in Valances in Leeds on Saturday mornings in the 60s, I learned more about jazz than I ever learned on the radio. I owe a lot of the scope and detail of my musical interests to record stores, and I wonder how the next generation is going to find that kind of opportunity.
I can't help feeling that an important educational window is closing with the demise of record stores. Yes, it will be easier and cheaper to get the piece you already know you want online. But what about the piece or the genre you didn't know about until you started browsing through the records in places like Tower? How are you going to learn about Hindemith or Art Tatum if you don't know about them already? Online music destroys many barriers while erecting others. The liberation of discovery won't be impossible in the new world, but I fear it might be a bit harder.
martin.kettle at guardian.co.uk
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam