Morning Lineup – July 22

The Record Shop

When is the last time you visited a record store?  In fact, when is the last time your town even had a record store to visit?  They’ve all dried up and blown away.  The largest modern chain store, Tower Records, liquidated their American stores and shut down this past December.

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We didn’t always have record stores, however.  The concept of the stand-alone record shop didn’t really catch on until the late 1950′s when the suburban shopping centers began to spring up outside the city centers.  Prior to that time, people bought their records over-the-counter in department stores and other mixed-product shops like Woolworth’s and Newberry’s.  In my neighborhood, we went to the local drug store for them.  There was a special section with a large wall shelf containing all the records for sale and on the counter were 3 or 4 turntables.  You would ask the clerk for a specific record to sample (yes, they actually had counter clerks to wait on customers then) and she would put it on the turntable and you would hold a little speaker up to your ear to listen to the record.

Most of you youngsters probably don’t know why today’s CD’s are called “albums.”  That term dates back to those earlier times when songs were recorded individually.  Before the advent of the LP vinyl record, they could only fit one song on each side of those very fragile discs.  So in order to increase sales, a popular singer would issue 3 or 4 discs in a book-type container and they were called albums.  The name has stuck over the years for any commercial recording that has multiple tracks recorded on it.

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Well, the times they are a’changing, as they always do, and the record store’s 40-year run is over.  Now most people, myself included, are buying online at places such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and DeepDiscount.com where the selection is literally unlimited and the prices are as much as 30% lower than the retail.  But for the people who prefer to browse looking for something they haven’t heard of before, the retail music market has withdrawn back to the multi-stock retailers like Wal*Mart and Target.  What goes around, comes around they always say.  Farewell, Record Store.