The Vinyl Countdown

The last few years have not been kind to record stores, but a few independent gems hang on.

By Jim Washburn for MSN City Guides

While not quite so dismaying as the billions of honeybees vanishing from our midst, one other distinct species has been suffering nearly as brisk an exit: the American record store.

Since its inception, recorded music has been a mass commodity, with 119 years’ worth of Edison cylinders, 78-rpm records, 33s, 45s, 4-tracks, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs having been sold in drug stores, truck stops and all points between. But for buyers who are a little nuts about music, there have always been record stores. Looking for obscure new sounds or some long-lost song, they’ll navigate aisles cramped with old vinyl and musty cardboard, arguing with the owner about whether or not Stravinsky, as a conductor, was the best interpreter of his music; whether John really intoned “I buried Paul” on “I Am the Walrus,” and if it’s more audibleon the mono mix; whether or not the only authentic way to experience Fela Kuti was on scratchy Nigerian pressings.

My town—Costa Mesa, Calif.—was until recently abuzz with record shops, from hulking outposts of the Virgin and now-kaput Tower chains to any number of cramped Mom ’n’ Punk independents. Big and small, nearly a dozen of them have vanished over the past few years.
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Vanishing breed
The reasons aren’t mysterious: In common with other brick and mortar retailers, profits have been squeezed by rent hikes, oil-spiked shipping increases, big-box competition and other overhead woes. Meanwhile, the music industry has been almost uniquely impacted by the Internet, with retail stores seeing the worst of it. Not only are sales siphoned off by illicitly downloaded music, but the labels’ licit digital sales also poach customers from the stores. And, if people aren’t downloading their music, many of them now buy their CDs and records online.

Big deal, one may say; horse buggy stables, porno theaters and photo print shops have all been made obsolete by technology in due time. But with record shops, something else is being lost.

"At the best record stores, there always was a feeling of camaraderie,” says record collector/dealer/DJ Mike Vague. “I’d almost always run into someone I know, and we’d recommend records to each other, then the store owner would get into it too, and the conversation would just go from there. It was sort of like the white man’s barber shop, a community watering hole where ideas, humor, politics and all this other stuff were shared.”

When he was a 12-year-old music fan in 1981, Vague happened into his first used record shop. “It really opened my eyes. I was astounded by the selection and by how cool the staff was and how much the staff knew. From that point on, I was hooked on independent record stores.”