Record Store Savior

As I have lamented before on this site, record stores are a dying breed. Not only the independent stores, but the huge chains like Virgin have not been able to defend themselves against the digital music assault of iTunes and Rhapsody. Well luckily there are two pieces of good news that could help save one of my favorite cultural icons.

First is that vinyl sales have been steadily growing in the past few years. They were up 33% in 2009 with 2.5 million LPs being sold. I've been trying to put my finger on why this would be. Maybe people are nostalgic and we'll start seeing a rise in sales of record players too. I was also thinking that maybe it had to do with the rise in popularity of DJS, but most DJs have gone digital. Also the number one selling vinyl last year was Radiohead, which doesn't seem to be a particularly mix friendly band. It's also interesting to note the talk shows now always hold up vinyl records instead of cds before a musical guest performs. This may just be that obviously a larger square shows up on camera than a smaller one, but it does say something that all these artist even have vinyl out.

The other factor that could help out record stores is that the Universal Music Group has decided to lower the price of cds that put out to $9.99 or less. One of the biggest problems for record stores is that it has been cheaper to download albums than to buy the actual cd. This is a change that retailers and artist have been pushing for a while. It has always been the record companies that have been holding back, seeing as they make the majority of the profits in cd sales. Well now UMG is realizing that to remain competitive they are going to have to change. It will be interesting to see how this works. While price does have something to do with lagging cd sales, i also think convenience is a big deal. It's so easy to just download an album directly to the device you use for listening to music than go to a store, buy an album and then upload it to a computer and transfer it to an MP# player. And with online reviews right on iTunes, you don't even need the opinions of the records store hipsters. While I am excited that cds, at least produced by UMG, will be cheaper, I am not too optimistic that it will save the record store.