The Guardian’s Martin Kettle, talking about the demise of Tower Records, gets it completely wrong.
I’m simply talking about the wonder of discovery. My generation learned an awful lot about music by browsing records in stores. It was both solitary and sociable. We learned in depth about bands and singers we’d not heard on the radio, that there were dozens of different recordings of this symphony or that sonata, and why this or that performer was better than the rest. And we learned in breadth too – as a teenager browsing in Valances in Leeds on Saturday mornings in the 60s, I learned more about jazz than I ever learned on the radio. I owe a lot of the scope and detail of my musical interests to record stores, and I wonder how the next generation is going to find that kind of opportunity.
I can’t help feeling that an important educational window is closing with the demise of record stores. Yes, it will be easier and cheaper to get the piece you already know you want online. But what about the piece or the genre you didn’t know about until you started browsing through the records in places like Tower? How are you going to learn about Hindemith or Art Tatum if you don’t know about them already? Online music destroys many barriers while erecting others.
Presumably Martin Kettle has never heard of music blogs, mailing lists of internet discussion forums. I cannot think of a single new band I’ve discovered in the past 20 years purely through browsing the shelves of HMV. More likely it be from a discussion in a place like The Opium Den or Mostly Other Music.
And unless you only care about whatever’s being hyped by the corporate media, high street record shops are increasingly useless for even buying music any more. A common experience is getting the train into Manchester, finding HMV has none of the CDs I wanted to buy, then ordering them online when I get home.
I think Martin Kettle really indulging in nostalgia for his misspent youth; the world has changed since he was 17. Most of those independant record shops run by music enthusiasts disappeared years ago, to be replaced by corporate chains staffed by people who might as well be selling baked beans. If HMV was to disappear tomorrow, I won’t miss it.
Many of my best music discovery experiences have been both online and offline, although I can’t deny that it’s become more online than offline as of late.
Still, I’m lucky enough to live near a major city that has some of the best-curated record stores around. Other Music, for instance, where I’ve gotten some wonderful recommendations from the staff whenever I walked up to the counter. It’s probably an open question as to whether something like Amazon’s shotgun-spray, hit-or-miss recommendation system is anywhere nearly as good (although I admit I’ve gotten some nice stuff that way as well).
What matters is not the way you get the buying advice, but the fact that it comes to you from someone else who is just as enthusiastic about is as you are, or even more so.