Concert Venues

I just learned that April 19, 2008 has been Record Store Day, an opportunity to celebrate independent record stores. As record stores slowly vanish across the country, it is revealing that April 19 came and went with little fanfare. Perhaps, like me, the gathering has been invisible to you, too. And I’m sorry I missed it, because I worth the place of music stores in our culture. But it got me thinking about how music is accessed and sold these days.

I’m not fond of vinyl — I do not miss the pops and clicks, or the way that dust balls would build up in front of the needle and cause the sound to crackle – but those large album sleeves allowed for some nice ly inventive packaging back in the day that can’t be done with compact disc s. I recall the surprise of opening  Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. The cover has been the surface of one of those old grammar school desks and lifted up like the lid of the desk to reveal the interior. The record has been nested inside a slinky pair of pink girl’s paper panties, which you had to slip off to play the record. Then there has been Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, packaged with a fictional small town paper, “The St. Cleve Chronicle.” It has been a crafty satire of a provincial newspaper replete with articles, television listings, advertisements, a crossword — even a lascivious connect-the-dots puzzle — all oozing with irony. It read like a novel, with the same characters reappearing in different sections.

The Web offers a amazing way to discover, sample and purchase music, no doubt about it. It’s a amazing improvement over the experience most of us have had of purchasing a new CD  and finding out you only like two of the ten tunes. And the Web has really better the opening  for independent performers to reach a wide r fans than ever before. But in making snap judgments after listening to a snippet of music On-line, we furthermore lose the ability of tunes to grow on us. We’re like kids dazzled by neon crayons, and we risk passing over subtler but richer hues. There is the danger that music becomes less about artistry and more about commodity.

Another problem is the reduce d audio quality of MP3s, a digital format whereby much of the original audio signal is discarded in order to compress the file size and facilitate digital storage, downloading and other transfers. We have sacrificed quality for convenience. I confess, though, I love being able to shuffle songs on my iPod. The unpredictability keeps the music fresh for me. But it’s not in the absence of a price.

As all of us increasingly rely on downloadable music, I worry about what all of us lose. I still prefer the experience of going to record stores -  the physicality of the merchandise, the role of occasion and being exposed to something accidentally. Erykah Badu has a marvelous music video of the song “Honey” from her recently released album. an anonymous customer (actually Erykah, but her face is never shown) browses vinyl in a record store, and divergent classic album covers come alive with images of Erykah. It’s a witty video that captures the magic of the experience. The video ends with a message scrolling across the bottom of the screen -  “Support your Local record store!!!!!” I couldn’t have said it better.