In a period of just 10 years, the number of small independent record stores fell from 5,000 to just 2,800 as a result of diminishing sales and customers. One popular store in New York, NYCD (New York Compact Disc) has just closed their shop as their business had pretty much come to a halt, despite how strong their business was up until around 2001.
According to NYCD, they say that casual buyers who use to come in regularly started downloading music instead. Worse still, large chain stores started competing by offering lower prices, unlike the small stores which have to keep their high prices, thus discouraging more consumers away from the independent stores. Some of the newer artists also don't sell as well as the older ones use to due to the change in music. Finally, while albums had strong sales many years back, consumers are now spending their money on other entertainment instead such as DVDs, video games and so on.
When NYCD's business came close to a halt by 2003, they decided to start selling their stock through Amazon.com. Since then, their sales rose 500% in just two years, thus showing that they could only effectively carry out their business online. In the past three years, about 1,000 independent stores closed also.
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"We gave the place everything we had for 12 years," Sachs said. "Sal and I love music with all our hearts. We live and breathe it, every day. But in the end, the business and our customers didn't love us." There are plenty of causes. New recordings don't sell as they used to. Chain stores lured customers away with lower prices. Casual buyers who once crowded into the store began downloading songs. These discouraging trends have been plaguing independent record stores across the nation. What hurt the most at NYCD, however, was that many loyal customers also stopped coming to the store on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Shoppers who once spent $100 for Beatles bootleg recordings were now buying strollers and video games for their kids. They owned thousands of CDs, but there was less room for music in their lives. "Many of the people who were our lifeblood disappeared, and the store died," Nunziato said several days before closing. "It was like we were laid out in a funeral home." The full article, including the full story of NYCD can be read here. |
Going by NYCD, it looks like downloading is just one of many factors causing the drop in sales in stores, even though the recording industry seems to just consider it as the only factor. Unfortunately, as large chains have the ability to lower prices due to the sheer amount of items they sell, the small independent stores cannot do the same, especially since the music labels charge such high trade pricing as it is. As online CD stores can attract customers over a much greater area compared with physical high street retail store, it seems like these types of stores are the way to go, besides the large retail chains.
Source: Chicago Tribune
