Thoughts on the Indie Music Store "Apocalypse"
I read a Pitchfork article today entitled "Best Buy to Indies: Drop Dead." It is basd on a blog written by Patrick Monaghan, the president of an independent record label. Evidently, several major Indie labels have struck deals with Best Buy wherein the stores pay for preferential treatment in advertisements and in-store positioning, and Best Buy purchases a much larger quantity of their merchandise. In this case, Best Buy has decided to sell albums by these labels, which include The Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene for $7.99. Mr. Monaghan sees this as a death knell for independent music stores:
"If indie retail disappears completely where are the baby bands going to develop into the bands large enough to appear at BB or to sell a song to an ad or The OC? Where do the hip kids who devour Pitchfork and Punk Planet and Venus looking for their next cool band find that band if nothing exists to support smaller bands in the first place?I feel like I can see a possible end and it's pretty sad, and not just because it's the business that I'm in..."
He then goes on to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. This argument reminded me of a recent entry I read in Mark Cuban's blog. Cuban addresses all of the Hollywood executives and theatre owners who see the ever shrinking window of DVD releases as a similar death knell to their theatre chains. Cuban remarks:
"Not a single person said "It could hurt our business, but we will just have to work harder to bring people in to our theaters". Not a single person said, "It will make us have to work harder and create a better value and experience for our customer...." No one even remotely associated with the industry even attempted to spin the situation. No one attempted to leverage the publicity (except for us of course) to their advantage."
This seemingly goes hand in hand with the quote that Matador Records president Gerard Cosloy gave to Pitchfork:
"Cool record stores should have something else up their sleeves besides using Best Buy as the bogeyman."
I think that both people are absolutely correct. Both record store and theatre ownersare in businesses which have witnessed tremendous changes within the past decade, and even more drastic changes are only going to come in the next few years. If a independent record stores only plan to deal with this issue is to hope that, like an organic farm, people are willing to pay more for a product just to cast your vote for how the world should be, they will fail. Obviously, the record stores will never be able to match Best Buy's album prices, but they need to think of some ways to make their products have an increased value over the CD you buy at Best Buy, much as the major labels have begun packaging DVDs and other extras with CDs to give them value over downloads. A couple ideas that lept to my mind were that autographed copies of CDs, (provided by the labels), could be seen as being worth the extra few dollars. Or possibly the establishment of Frequent Buyer clubs, with CD preview listenings or in-store concerts being the rewards for purchasing multiple CDs. The sentiment that a plain CD is too expensive is not going to be going away anytime soon.
Also, if Mr. Monaghan believes that without independent record stores, the "kids who devour Pitchfork" will not be able to find the next cool band, he would be no doubt interested to learn that all five of the CDs that Pitchfork reviewed today are available for purchase on Amazon.com. In addition to the thousands of music blogs making recommendations, there are services such as Pandora and last.fm designed to provide suggestions based on your exact musical preferences. It seems to me that many people who twenty years ago would have opened up a record store, have found newer, and more relevant outlets for their passions. Mr. Monaghan's frustrations are understandable, but he should be banding together with other independent record stores to offer the consumer something that no other retail entity can, thereby justifying the stores existence in this wild, wacky iTunes era.
