[Infowarrior] - Music stores blame RIAA for industry woes

[Richard Forno]

Spinning Into Oblivion

By TONY SACHS and SAL NUNZIATO
Published: April 5, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/opinion/05sachsnunziato.html?ei=5090&en=4e
2f9295623fb736&ex=1333425600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

DESPITE the major record labels¹ best efforts to kill it, the single,
according to recent reports, is back. Sort of.

You¹ll still have a hard time finding vinyl 45s or their modern counterpart,
CD singles, in record stores. For that matter, you¹ll have a tough time
finding record stores. Today¹s single is an individual track downloaded
online from legal sites like iTunes or eMusic, or the multiple illegal sites
that cater to less scrupulous music lovers. The album, or collection of
songs ‹ the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years ‹ is
suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way
of the shoehorn.

This is a far cry from the musical landscape that existed when we opened an
independent CD shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1993. At the
time, we figured that as far as business ventures went, ours was relatively
safe. People would always go to stores to buy music. Right? Of course, back
then there were also only two ringtones to choose from ‹ ³riiiiinnng² and
³ring-ring.²

Our intention was to offer a haven for all kinds of music lovers and
obsessives, a shop that catered not only to the casual record buyer (³Do you
have the new Sarah McLachlan and ... uh ... is there a Beatles greatest hits
CD?²) but to the fan and oft-maligned serious collector (³Can you get the
Japanese pressing of ŒKinda Kinks¹? I believe they used the rare mono
mixes²). Fourteen years later, it¹s clear just how wrong our assumptions
were. Our little shop closed its doors at the end of 2005.

The sad thing is that CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and
profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of
shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the
Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the
opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business
prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of
weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

In the late ¹90s, our business, and the music retail business in general,
was booming. Enter Napster, the granddaddy of illegal download sites. How
did the major record labels react? By continuing their campaign to eliminate
the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on
album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet
Boys and Britney Spears ‹ whose strength was single songs, not albums. The
result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the
dearth of singles and the high prices.

The recording industry association saw the threat that illegal downloads
would pose to CD sales. But rather than working with Napster, it tried to
sue the company out of existence ‹ which was like thinking you¹ve killed all
the roaches in your apartment because you squashed the one you saw in the
kitchen. More illegal download sites cropped up faster than the
association¹s lawyers could say ³cease and desist.²

By 2002, it was clear that downloading was affecting music retail stores
like ours. Our regulars weren¹t coming in as often, and when they did, they
weren¹t buying as much. Our impulse-buy weekend customers were staying away
altogether. And it wasn¹t just the independent stores; even big chains like
Tower and Musicland were struggling.

Something had to be done to save the record store, a place where hard-core
music fans worked, shopped and kibitzed ‹ and, not incidentally, kept the
music business¹s engine chugging in good times and in lean. Who but these
loyalists was going to buy the umpteenth Elton John hits compilation that
the major labels were foisting upon them?

But instead, those labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we
know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and
Wal-Mart. These ³big boxes² were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs
and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our
wholesale cost. They didn¹t care if they didn¹t make any money on CD sales.
Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with
exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender
that frappéed.

The jig was up. It didn¹t matter that even a store as small as ours carried
hundreds of titles you¹d never see at Best Buy and was staffed by people who
actually knew who Van Morrison was, or that Tower Records had the entire
history of recorded music under one roof while Costco didn¹t carry much more
than the current hits. A year after our shop closed, Tower went out of
business ‹ something that would have been unthinkable just a few years
earlier. The customers who had grudgingly come to trust our opinions made
the move to online shopping or lost interest in buying music altogether.
Some of the most loyal fans had been soured into denying themselves the
music they loved.

Meanwhile, the recording industry association continues to give the
impression that it¹s doing something by occasionally threatening to sue
college students who share their record collections online. But apart from
scaring the dickens out of a few dozen kids, that¹s just an amusing
sideshow. They¹re not fighting a war any more than the folks who put on
Civil War regalia and re-enact the Battle of Gettysburg are.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album.
The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc.
And today it¹s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels
themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having
quite figured out how to make it pay.

At this point, it may be too late to win back disgruntled music lovers no
matter what they do. As one music industry lawyer, Ken Hertz, said recently,
³The consumer¹s conscience, which is all we had left, that¹s gone, too.²

It¹s tempting for us to gloat. By worrying more about quarterly profits than
the bigger picture, by protecting their short-term interests without
thinking about how to survive and prosper in the long run, record-industry
bigwigs have got what was coming to them. It¹s a disaster they brought upon
themselves.

We would be gloating, but for the fact that the occupation we planned on
spending our working lives at is rapidly becoming obsolete. And that loss
hits us hard ‹ not just as music retailers, but as music fans.

Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato own an online music retail business