The problem with surfing he web as a way to find music, books or movies is on the web you find what you’re looking for, but rarely anything else. When you frequent a personally run media store you get exposed to things you weren’t looking for. You walk in to music on the stereo, the guys behind the counter get to know you and your taste, you run into other people and can chat with them. Some of my favorite bands I was exposed to because the record store guy said “well if you like them you should give these guys a try”, the web can’t do that. Amazon tries with “others who bought this bought” but it’s not the same as a person you see every couple of weeks. The web creates tunnel vision where the indie stores create buffets.
You must not have a Pandora account.
Also, besides Pandora, there are a lot of music blogs that go pretty in depth to particular genres. I don't know your cup of tea for music, but two pretty good music blogs are Nine Bullets and Big Rock Candy Mountain.
“The problem with surfing he web as a way to find music, books or movies is on the web you find what you’re looking for, but rarely anything else.”
I don’t at all agree with this, but I’ll stipulate that, yes, you pick up less along the way than you would had your taste been informed by connoisseurship at the local record or used book store. My point, though, again, is that the internet is merely a tool of efficient commerce, and as such is vastly superior to specialty shops. If you’re looking to inform your taste, there are bibliographies and liner notes and so forth, but more important actual human beings out in the world that don’t have to be met at the point of purchase. Allow them to influence you.
“The web creates tunnel vision where the indie stores create buffets.”
Here is where your argument completely breaks down for me. Before this point I might take your word for it that the sort of community found in record stores is legitimate enough, and in any case vastly superior to online ones. But never can I ignore the fact that’s as plane as the nose on their faces. Alternative record shops and used book stores do not contain all the colors of the rainbow. Those people are pretty narrow-minded on their own, as well parodied in the movie “High Fidelity.”
There’s a reason “nerd” has a bad connotation. That sort of connoisseurship tends toward snobbism and obscurity. You’ll never find people more standardize than in cult communities.
More than that, though, my point all along has been that communities based on commerce are poor substitutes for traditional ones. That is, granting that trade has influenced society across the millenia in countless ways, but that commercial society in the age of the Athenian agora (which I take to be the conventional apex of the link between commerce and high culture) and the age of the head shop are vastly different.