Now that the Music Specific Retail Stores Are All But Dead...
<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/03/13/starbucks-music-label.html#skip300x250">What's gonna happen next?</a>
After seeing Tower bite it and watching more and more folks go through Itunes / SLSK (or the p2p of yr choice) / podcasts, streaming internet, et. al, most record shops
that aren't mom andpop with a specific niche seem to be done.
Without a way to have a mass market to buy music in person in a format that you can actually hold in your hands and take home with you to be manually inserted into a player, I think you'll start seeing these ancillary businesses start getting more involved in selling music through their chains.
I'm sure right now its more of the 'impulse' and / or, 'oh, while I'm here, I can also get some music' - but eventually would a mainstream audience say something like - I'm going to Starbucks to buy some music (not necessarily for an overpriced beverage in a (not -so) hip environment?
Interesting (and scary)to think what is coming down the pike...
THIS IS THE POST OF THE DAY!!!!!!!!!
This type of thing is probably also falling into some of the new strategies retail music sales are looking into.
I remember that when the 'Ken Burns Jazz' series ran on PBS there was a "Starbucks" (TM) cross promotion where you could get a booklet of all (or a lot of) the featured artists bios as well as a very small smattwering of their cds.
Call me a cold-hearted capitalist, but why do I care that Tower's business model is obsolete?
Sorry - I was trying to make a qualifying statement : "in a format that you can actually hold in your hands and take home with you to be manually inserted into a player"
My interest / concern in this thread is physical music that at some point you hold in your hand whether it by a cd or a record or tape or what have you.
I am vaguely already aware of this thing called the internet and mp3/flac/aiff files :)
Im not asking people to feel sympathy for the old model of retail music stores - I am just curious business wise what record companies are trying to do to help their non digitally adaptive customer base continue to send them money.
It certainly wont be something that I will be doing, but that doesn't mean Im uninterested.