Where do you go to buy music?
If you're under, I don't know, 35, your first instinct is probably to iTunes or Amazon. On the off occasion that you want an actual CD, you might still buy it off Amazon, or you might check Target or Wal-Mart. If it's a little more obscure and you're feeling hip, you might go to Grimey's, or your local equivalent of the indie hole-in-the-wall.
Know where you don't go? Tower Records. Or Virgin Records. Know why? They don't exist. Not anymore. Not in this country, anyway. The last Tower Records store closed in 2006, including the infamous one in West Hollywood. Virgin Records shut down their last remaining stores - including the huge flagship location in Times Square - in 2009. (Both chains still operate international franchises and as online retailers.)
Now, on to my next question.
Where do you go to buy books?
The answer to this question five years from now might be eerily similar to what you'd say about buying music today. I currently work in a chain book store, and everywhere I look, I see the sad parallels to what happened to music retail.
Here's why I think book stores are headed down that same road. I broke down my thoughts by equating the major players in music retail with their counterparts in book retail.
The book industry pretended for too long, as did the record industry before it, that the digital revolution would never be enough to affect physical product sales. The record industry was wrong. So was the publishing industry. Amazon now sells more ebooks for its Kindle than it does paperbacks. "I still prefer holding a real book; I could never read off of a computer screen all day." Tell that to your CD collection, wherever it sits collecting dust. I can remember saying essentially the same thing when iPods were first introduced, scoffing at the idea that someone would want to buy something without having a physical item to show for it.
Amazon = iTunes
Low prices and no real competition worked for iTunes with mp3s, and it works for Amazon with eBooks. Funnily enough, now it is Apple who wants a share of what Amazon has cooking, hoping the iPad and iBooks can take a bite out of Amazon's monster ebook market share.
Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Sams = Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Sams
Amazon has the additional advantage of also selling physical product, for cheaper than you can find it in a store. If you do want it from a store, you're going to go to a big box retailer. You can pick your favorite, but from the perspective of the dying bookstore, they're all villains. Did you know big box retailers sell music and books for a loss? 50% off that just-released best-seller is merely a way to get you in the door. They'll gladly take the hit there, while you fill your cart with other stuff. $14 instead of $19, plus you can pick up toothpaste and new shoes? Who wouldn't take that deal?
Indie Bookstores = Indie Record Stores
Maybe you're a buy-local advocate. Maybe the thought of shopping at the Evil Empire turns your socially-conscious stomach. That's okay. There will still be indie bookstores. There just won't be as many of them. And they will struggle to stay in business. And they'll most-likely cater to a particular niche of reader. And they won't always have what you're looking for. But the ones that breed loyalty and maintain a cult-following will still be around, as a haven for old souls. Which leads me to...
Real Books = Vinyl (and, for now, still CDs)
Music freaks still love their vinyl. They like the way it sounds. They like the way it feels. They like that it is cool to have a record player. And real books? They'll become the LPs of book lovers. Or, for now, at least the CDs of book lovers and people who roll old-school. Plenty of people with iPods still buy the occasional CD, and plenty of vinyl-enthusiasts also have iPods. There's room for overlap. Books aren't going to disappear or stop being printed. But the ebook revolution has officially arrived. And it's not going to disappear, either.
Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million = Virgin Records, Tower Records
So we come to this. Will bookstores, like the one you might go to if you needed a book today, go the way of the record store? Every argument to the contrary is an echo of the now-defunct reasons people gave 10 years ago for why record store chains wouldn't go under. It's starting already. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble closed stores in the past year, no doubt with more to come, and rumors of bankruptcy swirl around one or the other ever week.
Bigger and brighter and more economic and industry-savvy minds than mind have been looking at this issue for a while. What do you think? Where do you buy your books and your music? Have you joined the ebook revolution?
4 comments:
I should comment that I specifically didn't touch on libraries, because unlike their free counterpart in the music industry (first Napster, now legal sites like Pandora), they have been around for longer than retailers and don't pose a distinct business threat. The ability to get and listen to music, on demand, for free, totally punched the music industry in the throat. Libraries never punched anyone anywhere. Libraries are more akin to terrestrial radio. Which, it should be added, is also a suffering medium.
I think you've drawn a strong parallel here, and I'm sure your logic is correct. I'm just not sure where I as a consumer of media fit into this picture.
I am an avid reader who has never really gone out and bought books to read for the first time, either digital or hardback. (I don't own a Kindle-like device.) I just use the public library heavily, and occasionally hit up the used bookstore. I only go into real bookstores to buy books as gifts, or on the rare occasion that I'm desperate to own a hard copy of something I've already read and really loved. The only exception would be a reference book, like a book of knitting patterns or a cookbook, which I would research extensively before purchasing, and probably buy using a coupon.
Otherwise, books are a somewhat extravagant waste of money to me (kind of like $10 for a movie in the theater, to some extent). I have never understood paying $15-$20 to buy a book I might not like. It does not compute. Of course, your music/book parallel holds in that I'm just as bad with music, as you know. I will not buy a CD on which I only like 2 songs, unless it costs under $2. (As an aside: buying music by the album frequently feels like a ripoff, because there are always at least 1 or 2 tracks you would never have paid money for if you could have avoided it. But since I never paid full-price for CDs even before digital music, I actually spend MORE on music now that it's cheaper.) Not surprisingly, I am a huge fan of radio... :)
Ben and I talked more about this over dinner. I posited a guess that the best indie music stores are probably doing better business now than they were five years ago when the chain stores were in business. I can imagine the same would be true for indie bookstores in a future w/o Borders/B&N. They would have a chance to flourish again, as the authentic, local alternative to big box retailers.
It is also very interesting to see, from the creative standpoint, how current changes in the book world mirror what happened in the music industry. With the advent of the internet, digital music, and social media, an artist basically doesn't need anything other than his or her own computer to record and release music. With the advent of the ebook, self-publishing is now almost as easy. Just another interesting comparison!
haha, Jon and I talked about it more over dinner too. It's an interesting topic! Hopefully it's not so late that I've stopped making sense, because here comes another long comment!
I think this whole process extends to the movie/tv industry as well. It's not just a few, super-rich studios making movies now. Cheap indie films, online content, and documentaries are more popular than ever! Meanwhile, the industry of selling movies to consumers has gone from Blockbuster (bankrupt) to Netflix streaming. People watch Hulu or stream the whole season of a show on Netflix instead of watching it live anymore. I run into this all the time trying to get people to watch Parks & Rec ("I'll wait until this season's over and watch seasons 1 and 2 all at once.") If no one's watching it live, the show will get poor ratings and the network might not want to produce it anymore because it will pull in less ad revenue, etc. It's a weird cycle. Will networks and studios start charging distributors like Hulu more for their content, or will it become a proprietary thing, where you can only watch last night's Parks & Rec on NBC.com?
I like your point about self-publishing and distributing ebooks and music too. Taking the long view, it's interesting that the huge corporations of the industries who've had a monopoly on producing, in effect, culture (music, books, and movies) are now gradually losing their control on dictating what is popular, as their empires are weakening. But it's killing the distributors faster, because they were the middlemen of the industry, and thus the first to go when things get tight. And it's weird that *that* process is being hastened by other huge corporations like Walmart, Amazon, et al. Hopefully small, local, indie interests will continue to command a growing market share!
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