Woebot
Well-known member
It looks like my local store Golden Grooves is shutting down.
We came across the owner the other night emptying the store in shopping market trolleys.
"Trade's really bad, they've put the rent up and I'm going to have to shut the shop down", he said "I'm going to stash these in my basement and sell them on the net"
This year will always go down on record for me as the year the Second-hand record store died. Its a tragedy.
But on the other hand if you visit eBay or GEMM the whole place is filled with those self-same boutiques selling their stock. It occurred to me that the proclivity and deep availability of music, I mean you can literally get ANYTHING you want must have benefitted from this implosion of the second-hand stores into the web.
All the stock is there! And you can search it. If you'd been to any one of those shops you might have been able to get one or other thing you were trying to find, but as it is, as a swollen organism, now everything is findable at the press of a button.
I mean how many times have you bothered to search through an entire online boutiques stock via eBay or GEMM? You don't, you cherry pick.
However, conversely it strikes me that the maintenance and availability of these vaste databases of records isn't something that can continue indefinitely. I mean, the rewards we're reaping now, the conditions which have made that possible will change quite rapidly. For one thing as these stores go out of business, keeping the stock available will gradually become impossible. Quantities such as these, well people can't stash them under their beds, and it takes manpower to manage these record sales businesses, manpower which stores must be finding is scantily rewarded. How many records COULD an individual shop actually sell in these conditions?
Anyway, my theory is that quite soon, in lieu of conglomerates arriving and rounding up all this stock into huge acutely-catalogued warehouses, quite soon we'll find the "deep" availability will evaporate. In short, if it's rare, and you want it, but it now.
We came across the owner the other night emptying the store in shopping market trolleys.
"Trade's really bad, they've put the rent up and I'm going to have to shut the shop down", he said "I'm going to stash these in my basement and sell them on the net"
This year will always go down on record for me as the year the Second-hand record store died. Its a tragedy.
But on the other hand if you visit eBay or GEMM the whole place is filled with those self-same boutiques selling their stock. It occurred to me that the proclivity and deep availability of music, I mean you can literally get ANYTHING you want must have benefitted from this implosion of the second-hand stores into the web.
All the stock is there! And you can search it. If you'd been to any one of those shops you might have been able to get one or other thing you were trying to find, but as it is, as a swollen organism, now everything is findable at the press of a button.
I mean how many times have you bothered to search through an entire online boutiques stock via eBay or GEMM? You don't, you cherry pick.
However, conversely it strikes me that the maintenance and availability of these vaste databases of records isn't something that can continue indefinitely. I mean, the rewards we're reaping now, the conditions which have made that possible will change quite rapidly. For one thing as these stores go out of business, keeping the stock available will gradually become impossible. Quantities such as these, well people can't stash them under their beds, and it takes manpower to manage these record sales businesses, manpower which stores must be finding is scantily rewarded. How many records COULD an individual shop actually sell in these conditions?
Anyway, my theory is that quite soon, in lieu of conglomerates arriving and rounding up all this stock into huge acutely-catalogued warehouses, quite soon we'll find the "deep" availability will evaporate. In short, if it's rare, and you want it, but it now.