[78-L] more on the death of the record store

[Donna Halper]

Since the subject of the demise of record stores 
came up on this list recently, I thought I'd 
share this new article from Salon.com:


Like a Virgin Megastore, shut for the very last time

All U.S. outlets of the music chain will be 
closed before summer in another sign that the 
record store as we knew it is dead.

Joy Press

Mar. 12, 2009 | 
http://www.salon.com/news/brand_graveyard/feature/2009/03/12/virgin/

The ground floor of the Times Square Virgin 
Megastore has an air of chaotic neglect. Generic 
"Everything Must Go!" and "Nothing Held Back!" 
signs hang over shelves crammed with recent DVDs, 
"Guitar Hero" dolls and PS2 games. Downstairs in 
the deserted music section, one person 
distractedly stops at the table piled with box 
sets of Springsteen and Björk. Almost everything 
is 40 percent off, but that's not convincing 
enough. I walk over the image of Nirvana's 
"Nevermind" cover projected onto the floor -- a 
reminder of a time when people actually got 
excited about buying records -- and try not to 
step on 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NirvanaNevermindalbumcover.jpg>the 
floating baby.

This branch of Virgin Megastore 
<https://www.virginmega.com/VMS/screens/about_us/locator/times_square.jsp>at 
Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan, apparently 
the single highest-volume music store in all of 
America, is closing in less than a month. In 
fact, <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29495864/>all 
six remaining U.S. Virgin branches are being 
shuttered this spring, leaving more than 1,000 
people jobless and leaving New York City without 
a major record store. It's not just the chains 
and the big names that are suffering. Some 
genre-specialist outlets are hanging in there, 
but generally speaking the independent record 
store is also teetering on the brink of 
extinction. It's the same story from big cities 
like New York and Los Angeles to college towns 
across the country. The current economic crisis 
is the death blow to 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/15137581/the_record_industrys_decline>an 
already weakened species. Even an economic uptick 
in the near future probably wouldn't save the 
retail music industry, which was staggering even 
when times were good. 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/music-sales-down>Sales 
of CDs have fallen in seven of the past eight 
years, and were down a full 20 percent from 2007 to 2008.

We know why people aren't buying music from 
stores the way they used to: online purchasing 
for those laggards who still crave albums in 
physical form, 
<http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/billboard-soundscan-digital-album-sales-up-32-in-2008/>legal 
and illegal downloading for everyone else. I 
can't even recall the last time I bought a CD 
from a flesh and blood salesperson. But sometimes 
when an old song pops up in my iPod, my mind 
inadvertently flickers back to the place that I 
first touched that record, and the epiphanies 
that punctuated my record store rambles. Maybe it 
was something I heard in the cramped second floor 
backwater Connecticut dump where the guy at the 
register played a Joy Division single on the 
store turntable, causing me and everyone else 
there to stop in our tracks; or the impossibly 
narrow West Village basement hangout where I 
always met people I knew who pointed me toward 
vinyl I needed to have. Yes, vinyl, as in a 
"record," from whence record stores got their 
names, the kind that had cover art big enough to 
see as well as a satisfying weight as you sifted 
methodically through the overstuffed record store racks.

And then there was Virgin Megastore on Oxford 
Street in London, which I visited on my first 
trip abroad as an Anglophile teen in the '80s. I 
was pretty wowed by everything English (a fast 
food chain called Wimpy Burger! Toilet paper made 
out of wax!), but I can still feel the special 
frisson of entering what appeared to be a 
music-lover's paradise: an enormous space 
pulsating with music and light, packed with miles 
of aisles of cool vinyl. Sure, you lost the 
intimacy of the independent store, but you also 
lost the potential downside: the "High 
Fidelity"-style resident snobs/experts, 
invariably male, ready to congratulate you when 
you made an aesthetically impressive choice or 
humiliate you with their withering looks when you 
failed to meet their standards. Virgin had an 
in-store D.J., private listening booths and 
plenty of room to mingle with records while also 
flirting with cute, lanky boys in eyeliner. 
Alongside the diversity of music, the megastore 
stocked a selection of culty and esoteric books, 
adding to the sense that Virgin offered a magical 
combination of mall-like consumer convenience and 
independent-minded cool. In America at that time, 
there was really nothing in between your Sam 
Goody chain store and the tiny mom-and-pop.

If I had known anything about Virgin's origins, 
it probably wouldn't have surprised me so much to 
find a place that seemed both mainstream big and 
underground intimate. Virgin mogul Richard 
Branson, now one of the most famous entrepreneurs 
(and richest men) in the world, had begun his 
career selling records out of the trunk of his 
car. That led to a mail order record company 
specializing in European imports of cosmic rock 
and progressive music. When a postal strike 
screwed with his mail-order business, Branson 
opened his first Virgin outlet in 1971 -- a 
groovy record store in Notting Hill Gate, then 
London's equivalent to San Francisco's 
Haight-Ashbury. Customers would hang out in the 
store all day, smoking joints while plopped on 
beanbags. Propelled by the 
fingers-in-too-many-pies ambition that would be 
the hallmark of his entire career, Branson also 
started a fashion company (called Virgin Rags) 
and a health-food store around the same time. 
Neither did as well as the record store or his 
next big venture, a music label that supported a 
roster of audaciously non-commercial music from 
its birth in 1973 right through to punk (Branson 
famously signed the Sex Pistols after they'd been kicked off two other labels).

The Notting Hill store begat the first megastore, 
which launched on Oxford Street, London's most 
bustling shopping boulevard, in 1979. Over the 
next decade and a half, Virgin would export the 
megastore concept all around the world, including 
the U.S. At its peak in 2002, the U.S. chain 
counted 
<http://www.physorg.com/news155324596.html>23 
stores and $230 million in sales. Those American 
spots generally offered the same kind of range as 
the Oxford Street store I visited all those years 
ago (even if they seemed a little less glamorous 
here on familiar ground, where the boys wore a 
lot less eyeliner). But it did have a rival, in 
the form of Tower Records, another store that 
made the record fiend feel giddy at the sheer 
scale and range of its stock, and also wore its 
alternative cred on its sleeves.

Tower went bankrupt in 2006. But Virgin 
Megastores in the U.S. is being dissolved because 
its current owners -- not Branson, who long ago 
sold off his retail chain, but a joint venture of 
real estate companies that bought the chain in 
2007 -- believe 
<http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2009/03/02/daily33.html>they 
can make a lot more money from the property that 
the Megastores occupy than from CD sales. (The 
British chain of megastores is also shutting 
down, though stores in places like Australia and 
Japan survive.) In other words, the new U.S. 
owners are betting on something, anything, other than music.

Virgin, like Tower, started to lose its luster a 
long time ago, of course, becoming more like a 
shopping mall than a record-geek haven. Still, 
for those who remember its prime, it's another 
melancholy reminder that an era is ending. In 
fact, there's been a whirlwind of commemorative 
activity recently dedicated to the independent 
record store, from the book "Old Rare New" (a 
collection of testimonials and essays) to the 
documentary "I Need That Record!: The Death (Or 
Possible Survival) of the Independent Record 
Store," which continues to make the rounds of the 
festival circuit. There is even a 
<http://www.recordstoreday.com>Record Store Day 
-- April 18 -- devised as a way to support 
independently owned American stores with special 
releases and performances. The only area of 
record retail that seems to be doing OK, even 
prospering, is used vinyl, especially the 
high-end, boutique sector catering to collectors 
willing to pay good money and who are still 
addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the random 
discoveries that you don't get from eBay or Gemm. 
But that only serves to reinforce the grim truth: 
The future of the record store lies in music's 
past. The Times Square Megastore, meanwhile, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/nyregion/15virgin.html?em>will 
be replaced by an outlet of the clothing chain Forever 21.