The Brick and Mortor music retailer…

It is a generally accepted  reality that most physical music retailers suck, but part of my upbringing  craves buying  physical media in a store, and I can’t help it, I sometimes want an object that I can put my fingers on.

This will not come as a suprise to anyone, and I know I may be writing a “well duh” kind of post, but I totally struct out looking for music in retail stores yesterday…

Laura and I were out and about and I thought to myself, I would pick up a copy of boston spaceships and maybe a copy of Bee Thousand and the new Bob Moive (a little obsessed these days, I know)

Well kids, good luck. Now, I’m outside of boston these days, so stopping by Newbury Street is not much of an option, so I went to TWO different Newbury Comics near my house, and in both stores, NO GBV at all, NO Boston Spaceships, and no DVD (which was just recently released)…From there, I checked out Best Buy (I needed something else there anyway), Borders, and then finally ended up @ a FYE that was in the process of closing, a fitting end to my search, kinda exemplifying the in-store experience for me:

Disorganized, ugly shelves half filled with pop cultures left-overs, like some sort of Ocean State Job Lots fire sale. Of course, no Boston Spaceships, no GBV, no DVD.

Maybe it’s because we  have gotten so used to looking for music from a online service, listening to a sample, and downloading it right away, and it’s  impossible to get that kind of convenient experience when you have to travel to a store and have to hope they have what you are looking for. So the retailers cut back on their selection, because people are not shopping for niche stuff there anymore, which in turn sends more people to online retailers, which spirals till you have what I ran into yesterday while shopping, the modern day equivalent to a Soviet block grocery store from the 1960s.

Oh well, I’ll buy it all online today, which is fine, but I miss the in-store experience sometimes, of thumbing through a rack of music finding what I was looking for, looking at the liner notes and art on the way home, and popping the music in when I got there.