The New Record Store

November 26, 2018

Once upon a time you went to a record store and fingered through countless vinyls in search of “the one”. Whether it be a single or an album, if you wanted to be listening to the latest and greatest then it was up to you to find it! However we have become lazy in our ways of finding new music, since the “glory days” of the industry have past (as most baby boomers would say) and the internet taking the lead our fingertips have become powerless in choosing who gets the limelight.

After having the recurring conversation “all music sounds the same these days” I started to notice a pattern in the people i would talk to; They all had the same method of listing to music, Spotify. I mean sh**! I’m using it right now as i type this, Spotify dominates the market now. Sure that have their bad days or years but: up, down, left, right, Spotify is so far, the streaming services that has been through it all. Streaming is now the best way to listen to music because it’s so easy to get to the latest and greatest. Only that’s the thing, it’s too easy.

PDF: RIAA Year End 2017 News and Notes (Click Image)

Spotify is just one of many streaming services that all need to make money in order to work only now instead of relying on the customer they realised they could sell back to the distributor. If a label or publisher wants an artist to hit the charts the streaming service names a price and they pay up. Therefore more often than not the labels with the biggest bank are advertising their most consistent artist. Ultimately resulting in a saturated market where you listen to what the label pays to put on your playlist or radio rather than you having to actively look for new music that you like.

Imagine this; it’s 1960s and you don’t want to listen to the Beatles again, you want something new. You’d have to take you walet walk down to the record store, spend anywhere between 10min to an hour looking that “something”, until you find a cover with man on the front playing a right handed Stratocaster… upside down, with the title “Get That Feeling”. You don’t know it yet what you end up taking home is a legend in the making who ends up packing out Woodstock 7 years later.

Now jump back to 2018 and again you’re in the mood for something different. Except you don’t move a muscle to achieve that, instead you pull out your phone scroll through a few playlists or start a new radio. It took you the same amount of time to find that song as it did for you listen to it! It’s a beautiful thing, the convenience of having a library of music at your fingertips but what did you risk? And was it like finding out that you were listening to Jimi Hendrix before he was cool. Most likely not, that “something” probably has between 100k-1M streams already not to mention the likelihood of having already heard it on a advert, movie trailer, cafe, bar or from your next door neighbour who is apparently deaf, is pretty high.

Article: Vinyl + CD Sales Were Bigger Than Music Download Sales In 2017 (Click Image)

Just because music is more accessible today doesn’t make it easier to find new music, if anything it makes it harder. Either way you as the listener still have to spend time finding new music if that’s what you really want. I do, but some days i don’t mind zoning out to a playlist where everything sounds similar.