Here’s an event that comes this close to a naked cry for help: “Record Store Day,” a nationwide effort to call attention to independent retailers of vinyl and CDs.
Rejected slogan: ‘Please Feed the Dinosaur.’
Today’s New York Times cites the key numbers:
Some 3,100 record stores around the country have closed since 2003, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research firm. And thats not just the big boxes like the 89 Tower Records outlets that closed at the end of 2006; nearly half were independent shops.
And there are few signs that the hard-goods sellers can survive the accelerating shift to the world of the music download. At best, it seems, today’s CD retailers will become much like the sellers of music on vinyl and wax: magnets for a small, devoted market of collectors, eking out money for supermarket sushi.
Still, as anyone who once spent hours perusing the racks of a record shop knows, it’s painful to watch the vanishing act. And so tomorrow’s event, which includes a live set by the Parlor Mob at Jack’s Music Shoppe on Broad Street, has a inarguable pull to it. Call it nostalgia, call it charity. Whatever. Why not just give into it?
Here’s what one local shopper, Bruce Springsteen, has to say about record stores, according to the Record Store Day website:
I buy CDs all the time. I’ll go into a record store and just buy $500 worth of CDs. I will! I am singlehandedly supporting what’s left of the record business.
I hate to see record stores disappear, and I’m old-school in that I think you should pay for your music. But what my kids do is download a lot of things, pay for them, and then if they love something, they’ll get the CD. That may be the future.
Five hundred bucks at a pop? OK, that’s off the chart. But there have got to be one or two CDs you’d just love to have before record stores disappear in a cloud of twinkling pixel dust.
Parlor Mob goes on at 2p in Jack’s loft. All used CDs, DVDs and LPs will be priced 25 percent off.
In addition, Zebu, will have a free coffee station set up at Jack’s for most of the day. Funk and Standard and Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash have also contributed stuff for give-away bags.
Sounds like a pretty good recipe for a weekly event, in fact…
