Tower Records: end of an era?
As most of you may have read or heard, Tower Records is about to die. This is something I've been watching unfold for several months now, and I had always thought the ones to acquire the iconic chain would be Trans World Entertainment, the largest growing CD/movie retailers aside from cheaters like Wal Mart or Target. Let's take a statement from an aging rocker I pulled from the streets of an unnamed city in the Bay Area. James Bassist says, "AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Led Zeppelin... all bands pivotal to my musical development, all bands introduced to me by the staff and community of the local Tower. I'm going home now to lie on the floor for hours not moving."
Two major factors resulted in this bankruptcy claim; two major shifts in modern lifestyle and economy: first, the switch from analog to digital, which has been taking place around us for several years, erupting with the onset of Napster and other peer-to-peer network systems, which allow the conversion of audio files from .wavs or whatever to mp3s, making it a common practice to simply download music to a harddrive of some sort and in turn steal records by "burning" them to a recordable disc. Who isn't guilty of this? The second factor, spurred on by the first, created vicious competition between the remaining record stores as record sales sharply declined, including places like Wherehouse, Coconuts, Strawberries Music, Tower Records, Amoeba, or Rasputin. These companies were put through their paces by larger retailers like Best Buy, Target, or Wal Mart, who used their advantage of capital to replicate the purchasing lists to distributors, ordering the same titles and quantities as record specialty stores, and selling them at lower prices. People bought from Best Buy and Target, dropping record sales even FURTHER from the original record stores. This forced them to buy each other out, resulting in a large centrific corporate presence known as Trans World Entertainment, which currently owns the brand labels of most known music stores: f.y.e., Wherehouse Music, Coconuts, Suncoast Movies, Sam Goody, Strawberries Music, and so on and so forth. Tower remained one of the last standing.
So now I can't decide which would be better, a future of understaffed, confused Towers who have been reduced to shells of their former grit and glory, a ghost of the past, or looking at a Starbucks every day on that famous lot on Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, and in London. I've seen what they did to Wherehouse Music. Suncoast. At the same time, a record store preserved by reputation like Amoeba doesn't stand a chance of outbidding a Starbucks or Jamba Juice for the space. Whatever happens, happens, and unless we can successfully run a $85 million charity drive to SAVE TOWER, we are about to lose one of the most influential and iconic record stores in the history of the industry.
It will be an economic manifestation of the end of the great age of records. Switch to digital now. Maybe Bob Dylan was right when he ragged on the quality (or lack thereof) of modern music this last week.
