Music Selection in Brick-and-Mortar Stores Today, A Nostalgic View

One of the strange things I have done for about 10 years is save all of my receipts, except for gas or food purchases. Why? Part habit, part practical reasons (returns) and a smidge of nostalgic reasons. Well, the latter caused me to go through a big pile of receipts that's still at my parent’s house last time I was there. I realized that DAMN I spent a lot of money at Borders Bookstore in my college years. I would bet that I slowly transferred them a few thousand dollars in a few years.

I have many fond memories of going to Borders after or between classes, that was essentially what I DID with my spare time. Other people hung out with friends or went somewhere, I went to look through books, and browse the classical music section. I'd often discover some new composer (thanks NAXOS!) and listen to it on the way back to school, and then read a review(s) of the disc in the computer lab if I had time. Let just put it this way: I was in heaven, and this normally cost less than $10, especially if it was on the budget label NAXOS. This was all helped by how I would try to save on things like food; back then, as now I would prefer to spend money on something tangible.

Anyway, in those days (2000-2004) the classical music selection was quite large, or at least large enough to where I could look through it for an hour once or twice a week without seeing too much of the same thing. But today it's hardly a shell of its former self. The last time I was in a Borders I covered the entire classical section in maybe 15 minutes, and it was hardly something I would return to pick through on a daily basis. I have to think that before long it will be like the classical section in a Best Buy -- which no one EVER bothers to look at. I mean, who really wants a grab bag CD of "The Best Romantic Adagios," random parts of random works by random composers and unknown performers?

According to "common wisdom" classical music is now purchased online more than ever before.* And while it's true that you can get more online than in any store, there's something about being able to BROWSE. There's something about making a new discovery and holding the item in your hand, looking it over. Sure I can and do browse online, but I can tell you 99 times out of 100 I won't buy it there, one reason is I hate waiting for it to arrive. For me the store acquired a sense of "place," it was somewhere I wanted to go, I liked the atmosphere, it fit in with my day, and in those days I had money and was willing to spend it.

I'm not blaming Borders, the reasons for this disintegration are numerous: One is that classical music isn't popular, and thus is the first to go in a store with limited shelf-space.** Make way for things that will sell...like trinkets that cause the store to look more like a "gift shop" than a bookstore.

There are other reasons, but one that gets little attention is that most people don't need more than one recording of a particular work that they like. I'm the opposite; I enjoy different "interpretations" or "renderings" if it's a favorite work. While there's probably hundreds of different recordings of Beethoven's 5th (to name a purely popular title), one will get most people by. And on top of this, since classical music doesn't tend to get old (and the composers are dead and not producing anything new) there's not as much incentive to explore more.

I'd be interested in anyone else's opinion on this; I have a feeling that this is the overall trend across the country. I visited Amoeba Music in San Francisco about 2 years ago where I was very impressed by the selection, but then it's probably the biggest new and used music store in the country.

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*A lot of classical music is also downloaded by both legitimate (e-music, amazon.com mp3) and illegitimate (torrent, p2p, etc.) means today. Ironically, as far as downloads go, the legit means are often compressed and lower quality than the illegit means which are often in CD quality.

**I remember a report in 2006 that said classical music sales grew over every other genre of music, this is probably due in part to "classical crossover" -- in other words, classically trained singers like Andrea Bocelli or Josh Groban who might as well be Yanni or John Tesh as far as I'm concerned.