Forget vinyl: Now CD stores are suffering from a generation gap, and they’re closing down in increasing numbers
So this is an evening rush?
On a recent Monday, six people — soon enough four, then two — were browsing the bins of compact discs at Norman’s Sound & Vision, a music store on Cooper Square in Manhattan’s East Village, around 6pm, a time that once constituted the daily rush hour. A decade ago, the number of shoppers might have been 20 or 30, said Norman Isaacs, the owner. Six people? He would have had that many working in the store.
“I used to make more in a day than I probably make in a week now,” said the shaven-headed Isaacs, 59, whose largely empty aisles brimming with punk, jazz, Latin music and lots and lots of classic rock have left him, many afternoons, looking like a rock ‘n’ roll version of the Maytag repairman.
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Maytag repairman? I thought that was funny!
Actually this is just another nail in the coffin of the industry and the RIAA. They are supporting a dying format and they are gonna lose bigtime.
But I can’t really find it in my heart to shed a tear for them though…they have had it comming for a long time! Suing your customers does NOT make you popular mabye that is finally starting to sink in.
I hope they take this as a message loud and clear that people are just fed up with the industry trying to shove dead formats down peoples throat! Things have changed since the internet has been introduced along with p2p….they can either embrace it or try to go on fighting it and lose.
How can the industry beat free? They can’t. People arent fed up theyre just able to get their greedy mits on music for free now. If there was a simple way to solve this problem Im sure they would be happy to hear it. Cheap downloads hasnt helped.
A shop in my town went under the same way. It was sad. I felt like a part of my youth was lost. I use to love working so I could go there every week and browse all the music and talk with the owner. He was cool. I got greedy and stopped going once I could download and now his dreams and shop are gone. I feel like it was my fault or at least I was part of the problem. You never know the people you hurt till it hits home then you can no longer ignore it. Oh well like anyone here will care right?
I also think it has something to do with the kind of music they market. It just doesn’t seem worth buying IMO. I haven’t heard a song on the radio that made me say “ooo I wanna buy that album.” The music on the radio these days sucks.
The value of music has changed people dont listen to cd’s over and over and over again. Most people I know will listen to 20 songs for maybe a month and then get bored of it. This only makes them less likely to buy it as its worth less in their views. I also cant say I feel sorry for the buisnesses everyone of them have had their time and some live and some die. You cant halt an industrie just to save those that cant keep up.
No one liked digging through bins and flipping through disc after disc to find the album containing two good songs. Now we can do it online and read compare and locate anything.. Oh yeah the free part makes it the best.
One great thing about CDs is that anyone with a computer can copy them to another disk or to another format fast and easy. At one time folks must have copied their 8-tracks to cassette to save their music but that would have taken time and would never have been as good as the original. Now we can make digital copies and don’t have to lose our music.