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Day The Music Shop Died The CD will soon be an historical artifact as the 'download generation' embraces the age of the MP3. No wonder the traditional record shop, beloved of all geeks, is on its last legs By John Harris The Guardian As millions of men well know, the publication in 1995 of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity marked a key moment in the history of the modern male psyche: conditions such as commitment phobia and pathetically living one's life by increments moved off the psychiatrist's couch and into the mainstream. Along the way, of course, the novel also evoked a subculture as instantly recognisable as any in the British social patchwork. With a backhanded affection, Hornby wrote of 'young men, always young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags, young men who spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and "ORIGINAL NOT RE-RELEASED" underlined Frank Zappa albums. They're as close to being mad as makes no difference. These days those young men are increasingly less visible. The record shops that used to act as their honeypot are disappearing fast, and the culture on which they thrived is changing beyond recognition. 'At the time it felt like it was there forever,' says Hornby, regretfully. 'Maybe the carrier bags had got smaller, but I couldn't see it disappearing. But that's started to happen, I suppose. In 31 Songs I wrote about a CD shop I used to go to in Islington - it was called Wood Music, run by a friend of mine - but it's not there any more. Halfway through the publication of the hardback he was struggling. By the time of the paperback he'd gone. It caused me quite a lot of grief actually, not least because I've still got a hangover from childhood memories of going into town on Saturdays, meeting friends in record shops. You can't really do that in Borders. As an embattled music industry well knows, illicit downloading is an ever-more dominant method of getting hold of music. To make things worse for shops, thirtysomething music consumers like me are increasingly deciding not to venture outside, preferring to use online services like Amazon instead. And - once we have the CDs - copying them for our friends. To take all this the final few inches towards nightmarishness, supermarkets are now selling CDs for a pittance, and thereby making record shops' survival all but impossible In the US, a new, sophisticated world of post-shop music consumption is quickly taking root. A journalist named Christopher Roxon has founded a CD-swapping network called Burning Sensations. The central idea - which is catching on rapidly - suggests a hip version of Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. Each fortnight one of its members runs off a themed compilation CD - songs about death, say - and mails copies to everyone else; the result is much on-line bonding, based on a barrage of emailed opinion In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, a sometime musician named Derek Sivers is in charge of a website called CD Baby which quietly declares war on the music industry by allowing bands to sell their music straight to curious customers. If it sounds like the kind of cult operation that need not worry either labels or record shops, think again: its biggest sellers get up to sales levels of around 40,000, and each Monday night CD Baby mails its contributors cheques to the value of $100,000 Paul Williams is news editor of the British trade magazine Music Week, and thus has to spend countless hours writing articles about record shops' misery. The picture he paints of their fate is grim indeed - all squeezed margins and forced redundancies 'There have been big casualties in the last few years,' he says. 'Names that have been there for years have just disappeared.' For example, Tower Records, the giant US chain, has pulled out of Britain completely (despite its name, the sole remaining Tower shop, on Piccadilly Circus, is now owned by Virgin Retail). Our Price, once a staple of every medium-sized British town, has also vanished, and its stores have been split into two: some are now known as Virgin Megastore Express, while others will eventually be flogged to an Australian firm which owns a chain called Sanity. That company, in turn, sold its acquisitions to a British owner, who saw sense around a fortnight ago and put the shops into administration Perhaps most worrying of all is the story of an independent chain called Andy's Records. As a child I used to take occasional holidays in Cambridge with my aunt. She called the kind of places where you bought LPs 'record bars', but knew that Andy's owned a clutch of shops in the city that had grown out of a market stall. Their records were absurdly cheap, something apparently down to their importation from the fringes of Europe (I still own my Greek copy of Paul McCartney's McCartney II) Andy's also had a successful second-hand shop, piled high with vinyl, called The Beat Goes On. While at Cambridge, Nick Hornby was among its most enthusiastic customers. 'I would go their for hours,' he says. 'My mate was the manager; I'd sit there all day drinking coffee.' It was here, surely, that the inspirational seed was planted for Championship Vinyl, the shop at the heart of High Fidelity At Andy's peak, they had 40 branches, serving such rock hotbeds as Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and Preston. But no more: in May this year, management called in the administrators, and the company's 20-plus remaining shops have since closed down 'Those kind of places tend not to have diversified into areas beyond selling music,' says Paul Williams. And the obvious response is: of course they haven't. The kind of people who worked at Andy's wouldn't know about X-Boxes and DVDs; their place in the human zoo was founded on rare Captain Beefheart albums and the search for vinyl copies of the Jam's This is the Modern World Here and there, however, the flame of Hornby-style obsession still flickers. On occasional day trips to Wiltshire I have enjoyed popping into the grimly named Sound Knowledge, an independently run shop in the pristine market town of Marlborough. On each visit, the shop - founded in 1995, and run by 44-year-old Roger Mortimer - has provided a heartwarmingly satisfactory service. The first time I went I bought a copy of Peter Gabriel's first solo album so I could play 'Solsbury Hill' while driving around the countryside. On my second visit I browsed through the alt-country section and came away with Twilight by the acclaimed husband-and-wife cult duo the Handsome Family. The third time, Roger was playing something interesting over the in-shop stereo so I asked him what it was. 'Coldplay,' he said, pointing at one of the biggest-selling albums of the year Having long since recovered from the embarrassment of that revelation, I phone Roger late on a Wednesday, when he is stocktaking. He, too, talks about squeezed margins - on chart albums, he says, he's often lucky to make 50p - but it takes little persuasion to make him rhapsodise about the records he's currently recommending to his customers: Joe Strummer's posthumously released Streetcore, Gillian Welch's Soul Journey and an album by an obscure French ambient enterprise called Zorg In between all the enthusiasm, however, he tumbles into anecdotes that beautifully illustrate the problems of businesses such as his. Reading trade reports and news stories, you often lose track of the causal chains that link tech-crazed adolescents downloading music and Amazon customers to the demise of small record shops. Roger's stories, however, make the connections plain 'There was a guy came in last night,' he says, 'a young bloke of about 22. He said he wanted a couple of posters we had on display, and offered to buy them off me. I said, "I don't really like to charge for them - just buy an album, and I'll give them to you." He said, "Oh, I don't really buy albums any more. I download everything." What did I say to him? Oh, I gave him the posters. You've got to be friendly. And here is anecdote number two. 'Again, this happened yesterday. A customer came in, picked up the Red Hot Chili Peppers's Greatest Hits and said, "This is £8.49 on Amazon. How much can you do it for?" There's not much you can say to that. Hornby may have been appointed the patron saint of shops such as Sound Knowledge but he confesses to being a fan of online music buying. 'I find that Amazon works quite well for kind of hanging around in,' he says. 'There's all that "Customer Recommends" stuff - "People who bought this also bought that". You can go on a little trail, the equivalent of what people used to do in record shops. I probably have a look on there every two or three weeks. As proved by his recent choice of luxury on Desert Island Discs, Hornby is also an evangelist for the iPod, the cigarette packet-sized, download-friendly device that is the embodiment of everything that is bedevilling people such as Sound Knowledge's Roger Mortimer. Hornby has yet to get a broadband connection and has only managed to download three songs so far, but he does admit to copying the odd CD for his friends People like him, however, are probably the least of the record shops' worries. For a start, he has never bought an album in a supermarket. 'I can't imagine that happening,' he says, with palpable horror. Most importantly, he is still prone to making a deeply old-fashioned connection between recorded music and the little silver discs you find in shops 'I still like buying CDs,' says Hornby. 'But there are a lot of people who will never pay for music ever again. Why would you? I was talking to a 17-year-old recently, and he said he didn't think his little brother had even seen a CD. He didn't actually know that music came like that.
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