[Dixielandjazz] Only slightly OT (by a generation/style or 2 ; -) The Graying of the Record Store

[David Richoux]

The New York Times
July 16, 2006

The Graying of the Record Store
By ALEX WILLIAMS

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 and Vision, a music store on
Cooper Square in Manhattan, around 6 p.m., 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 Mr. 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.
Just as troubling to Mr. Isaacs is the age of his clientele.

“It’s much grayer,” he said mournfully.

The neighborhood record store was once a clubhouse for teenagers, a  
place to
escape parents, burn allowances and absorb the latest trends in  
fashion as
well as music. But these days it is fast becoming a temple of  
nostalgia for
shoppers old enough to remember “Frampton Comes Alive!’’

In the era of iTunes and MySpace, the customer base that still thinks of
recorded music as a physical commodity (that is, a CD), as opposed to a
digital file to be downloaded, is shrinking and aging, further  
imperiling
record stores already under pressure from mass-market discounters  
like Best
Buy and Wal-Mart.

The bite that downloading has taken out of CD sales is well known — the
compact disc market fell about 25 percent between 1999 and 2005,  
according
to the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade  
organization. What
that precipitous drop indicated by the figures doesn’t reveal is that  
this
trend is turning many record stores into haunts for the gray-ponytail  
set.
This is especially true of big-city stores that stock a wider range  
of music
than the blockbuster acts.

“We don’t see the kids anymore,” said Thom Spennato, who owns Sound  
Track, a
cozy store on busy Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “That
12-to-15-year-old market, that’s what’s missing the last couple of  
years.”

Without that generation of buyers, the future looks bleak. “My landlord
asked me if I wanted another 10-year lease, and I said no,” Mr. Spennato
said. “I have four years left, then I’m out.”

Since late 2003, about 900 independent record stores have closed  
nationwide,
leaving about 2,700, according to the Almighty Institute of Music  
Retail, a
marketing research company in Studio City, Calif. In 2004, Tower  
Records,
one of the nation’s largest chains, filed for bankruptcy protection.

Greta Perr, an owner of Future Legends, a new and used CD store on Ninth
Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, said that young people never really came  
back to
her store after the Napster file-sharing upheaval of the late 90’s;  
she has
responded by filling her windows with artists like Neil Young and Bruce
Springsteen. “People come in and say: ‘I remember when I was 20, Steve
Miller’s second record came out. Can I get that?’ ” she said.

Industry statistics bear out the graying of the CD-buying public.  
Purchases
by shoppers between ages 15 and 19 represented 12 percent of recorded  
music
in 2005, a decline from about 17 percent in 1996, according to the  
Recording
Industry Association. Purchases by those 20 to 24 represented less  
than 13
percent in 2005, down from about 15 percent. Over the same period,  
the share
of recorded music bought by adults over 45 rose to 25.5 percent, from 15
percent.

(The figures include CD’s and downloaded songs, with CD’s still an
overwhelming share of the market in recorded music, 87 percent, in  
2005.)

The dominance of older buyers is especially evident at smaller  
independent
stores in metropolitan areas, where younger consumers tend to be more
tech-oriented and older music fans tend to be more esoteric in their  
tastes,
said Russ Crupnick, an analyst with the NPD Group, a market research  
firm.

At Norman’s, which is 15 years old and just around the corner from  
New York’
s epicenter of punk, St. Marks Place, shoppers with nose rings and dewy
cheeks are not unknown. But they may only be looking to use the  
automatic
teller machine. A pair of teenagers — he with ink-black dyed hair,  
and she
in ragged camouflage shorts — wandered in one evening recently and  
promptly
froze in the doorway, stopped in their tracks by an Isaac Hayes cut  
from the
70’s.

They had the confused looks of would-be congregants who had stumbled  
into a
church of the wrong denomination; they quickly shuffled off. Most of  
Norman’
s other customers were old enough to remember eight-track tapes. Steven
Russo, 53, for instance, was looking for jazz CD’s. Mr. Russo, a high  
school
teacher in Valley Stream, N.Y., said that he values the store for its  
sense
of camaraderie among cognoscenti as much as its selection. “It’s the  
ability
of people to talk to people about the music, to talk to personnel who  
are
knowledgeable,” he said.

Richard Antone, a freelance writer from Newark whose hair was flecked  
with
silver curls, said his weekly trip to the store is a visual  
experience as
well as an auditory one. “I remember how people admired the artwork  
on an
album like ‘Electric Ladyland’ or ‘Sgt. Pepper’ as much as the  
music,” he
said.

The lost generation of young shoppers — for whom a CD is a silvery  
disc on
which you burn your own songs and then label with a black marker — will
probably spell doom for Norman’s within the next five years, said Mr.
Isaacs, the owner. Several of his downtown competitors have already
disappeared, he said.

Some independent owners are resisting the demographic challenges. Eric
Levin, 36, who owns three Criminal Records stores in Atlanta and  
oversees a
trade group called the Alliance of Independent Media Stores,  
representing 30
shops nationally, said that businesses losing young customers are
  “dinosaurs” that have done nothing to cater to the new generation.  
Around
the country, he said, shops like Grimey’s in Nashville, Shake It  
Records in
Cincinnati and Other Music in New York are hanging on to young  
customers by
evolving into one-stop hipster emporiums. Besides selling obscure  
CD’s and
even vinyl records, many have diversified into comic books, Japanese  
robot
toys and clothing. Some have opened adjoining nightclubs or, in Mr.  
Levin’s
case, coffee shops.

“Kids don’t have to go to the record store like earlier generations,”  
Mr.
Levin said. “You have to make them want to. You have to make it an  
event.”

But diversification is not always an option for smaller stores with  
little
extra space, like Norman’s. Mr. Isaacs’s continued survival is due in  
part
to a side business he runs selling used CD’s on Amazon and eBay. He buys
them from walk-in customers who are often dumping entire collections.

Unlike the threatened independent bookstore, with its tattered rugs,  
dusty
shelves and shedding cats, indie record stores in danger of  
disappearing do
not inspire much hand-wringing, perhaps because they are not as  
celebrated
in popular imagination as the quaint bookshop. (Record geeks can  
claim only
“High Fidelity,’’ the book and movie, as a nostalgic touchstone.)

Still, the passing of such places would be mourned.

Danny Fields, the Ramones’ first manager, points out that visiting  
Bleecker
Bob’s on West Third Street in the late 70’s was “like experiencing  
the New
York music scene” in miniature — it was a cultural locus, a trading  
post for
all the latest punk trends. “Dropping into Bleecker Bob’s was like  
dropping
into CBGB’s,” he said. (You can still drop into Bleecker Bob’s.)

Dave Marsh, the rock critic and author of books on popular music,  
noted that
rockers like Jonathan Richman and Iggy Pop honed their edgy musical  
tastes
working as record store clerks.

“It’s part of the transmission of music,” said Mr. Marsh, who recalls  
being
turned on to cult bands like the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention by  
the
clerks at his local record store in his hometown, Waterford, Mich.  
“It seems
like you can’t have a neighborhood without them.”