[GSWarrior]

I am not the author. Thought it would make for good discussion.

[dfwgator]

Here in Dallas, we have Half-Price Books, it’s like a museum.

[RedStateRocker]

The other side of it was just how hard it was for a young band or musician to get anyone to hear their music.

The olden days are far too romanticized (always in in everything IMHO). A band would struggle for months or years, spend a huge amount on a “demo” hoping to capture the attention of an A&R person, and if lucky enough to ‘sign a contract’ had to sign over pretty much all the rights to their work.

Give me a world where I can write a song on Friday night, lay down some of the tracks, send the Pro Tools file to a bud 3000 miles away for lead or back up vocals, mix the damn thing and be selling it on Garage band or CD’s at a gig or market by Sunday.

I don't miss LP’s *one.damn.bit* Be it Mongo Santamaria or Mozart, trying to compile a complete collection used to take years and thousand of dollars and cleaning a piece of vinyl and replacing needles and dealing with insufferable nipplheads in record stores who wouldn't know Shostakovich from Scarlatti.

[harmonium]

Actually, I think it’s more a case of free market capitalism eating alive a corrupted political system where content was chosen by a small group of overlords.

Sure the indie stores suffer, but even during the 90’s boom of small press and independent labels, they were using the same 4 distributors. Much of it was marketing.

So now, anyone can publish, and produce, with cheap tools, and the market has been flooded. The market realities are that the only products making money are mass market paperbacks, Imax films or huge budget Blockbusters, and Arena tours. A tiny percentage of material will slip through and defy that rule, but the reality is, it’s not just your friend and his home recording system who can’t get a break now...it’s legends with cult followings like Prince. It’s Hollywood studios and the Cineplex chains.

[Tublecane]

This is like someone who tinkered with engines in his barn back in the 1890s whistfully complaining about the easy availability of automobiles in the 1920s. We have the internet now, and it can give us whatever weird, crazy crap we want without bothering to find a little boutique.

I understand nostalgia, and, indeed, have fond memories of little, local treasures selling food, clothing, music, books, etc. that I was forced to go out of my way to visit. But when you get down to it, commerce is commerce. If I can get what I want without unique atmosphere and comraderie, all the same. McDonald’s and Wal-mart can take over the world, for all I care. I wouldn’t waste time crying for lost stores. Save the whistfulness for lost family, friends, community, art, religion, or whatever.

By the way, I realize “community” and commerce go together, to a certain extent. So don’t remind me. It’s just not a very important part of community, in my opinion.

[Revolting cat!]

The author may be referring to the 50s and 60s and not to the 70s when independent labels and producers disappeared and the industry consolidated into a handful of giant multi-nationals. There was quite a bit of hustle in those days, just ask Phil Spector, or Marshall Chess, but musicians had better chances of putting out records in the 50s than in the 80s.

Now, you could say, it's back to the old days as far as open market, because musicians can produce and market their own CDs. The problem with the Brave New World is that there are no referees, such as old time producers, and the market, or the Web, is filled with trash more than ever. (Just see epitonic.com)

While we're at it, do yourself a favor and lookup this dude, and the David Wax Museum.

[Revolting cat!]

Good old days were always better. Remember Emperor Franz Josef?

[a fool in paradise]

With a record or book, you have a tangible good. You have the right of resale. Not so with a digital download, you’ve bought it, that’s it. You MIGHT be able to get up to 3 REPLACEMENT download copied from itunes should your ipod/computer/cellphone/etc be stolen/break/get lost. Try claiming that loss of a music library with your homeowner’s insurance sometime...

The music industry doesn’t make money on the sale of used product and doesn’t particularly benefit from the prestige of rare records selling for $20-120-1200. They could always press more copies of the music (and in some situations, that would suffice to drive down the price of some rare R&B or rock single that was never released to an album). Some pioneering profiteers have taken to making their own bootleg pressings of obscure (but in demand) singles and compilation albums; some seek out proper rights payments, others just press the wax and try not to get caught.

[a fool in paradise]

"I’m a fan of the download. I like to hit enter and have the song appear on my iTunes within seconds, but there’s something about holding the artifact, about feeling it in your hand. It reveals a lot about the moment in time that the record was made. An abstract song could come from anywhere, but if you see something in a twelve-inch vinyl LP, with the cover art, or you hear the scratch in the 78, you get a sense of time and place that is, for me, irreplaceable."

Wax, shellac, and vinyl have gone through some format changes over time (cylinders of 2 playing lengths, pathe/edison/"standard" 78s (each played with a different stylus, Brunswick DID make a combination player). Even with the shift to wax there was a format war over 331/3 LP/EP vs 45single (or boxed album of singles). BUT in the end, dominant technology permitted you to play 78s from the 1910s-2011 LP/singles all on one contemporary turntable.

I question whether today's mp3s will still be supported by playing technology in 2110. And you certainly won't be able to reverse engineer a player from physical parts.

[Mr Rogers]

I spent a career around jet engines. A close & play record player (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3mqNbgXxXE&feature=related) would give better audio than I can hear. I’m fine with downloading mp3s that I can carry in a matchbox sized stereo giving me tunes while jogging.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Another way to look at it - the music industry hasn’t raised the technological bar. They should have pushed the tech standard to SuperCD and beyond. They should have innovated to deliver more compelling content made possible by the new technology. This they didn’t do and became a commodity in the process. I’m not sure what all the innovations should have or could have been - I guess some of these will emerge some day. Take Guitar Hero for example - basically someone figured out how to merge technology and music to create added value and the public ate it up. For the music industry to think that just sitting back and churning out 3 minute songs and that they could collect a King’s ransom in so doing seems wrong, certainly in retrospect, but also seemed wrong at the time.

[discostu]

I think he forgot how to go find them. It’s always been the case that indie stores rise and fall quickly, they lack the financial strength to survive setbacks, so the store you know and love tends to disappear when you don’t have time to go there for 6 months. That doesn’t mean they all died, just your favorite. Here in Tucson we’ve got a handful of indies, including an actual RECORD store no digital, but you can’t be surprised when one goes away, you just need to keep your eyes open for the others.

[sand lake bar]

We have a good coffee shop, record shop, and hookah bar all in one. I just bought Music from Big Pink on vinyl.

[Revolting cat!]

If you’re patient, you can find good new music on the web, but it requires lots and lots of patience. I used to go through hundreds of recordings on garageband.com and other now defunct sites where bands uploaded their tracks, and after spending hours listening I’d find a dozen or two gems which I then burned onto CDs to give to friends. That’s how I discovered Drive By Truckers a good several years ago.

I did this again recently on epitonic.com. (I don’t know any other sites like it, although this page which may or may not be up to date lists some: http://www.redferret.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php) My method, if you can call it that, is to listen to the first 15-30 seconds of the track, sometimes even less, to see if it grabs me and go from there.

There are tons and tons of hard noise rock and whiny singer songwriter stuff out there, but you can find a few original performers.

[x]

My mid-sized Southern college town has one remaining used record store and one remaining used book store. Our last independent video store closed in December, and our Borders – which drove out our independent book and record stores – recently got a dose of its own medicine and closed amid a blaze of luridly florescent signage of the kind you associate with particularly tacky used car lots.

If the day comes when college towns don't have at least one independent book and at least one independent music store, then things really have gone to hell.