LiveMusicBlog

I just learned that April 19, 2008 was Record Store Day, an opportunity to celebrate independent record stores. As record stores slowly vanish across the country, it is revealing that April 19 came and went with little fanfare. Perhaps, like me, the event was invisible to you, too. And I am sorry I missed it, because I value the place of music stores in our culture. But it got me thinking about how music is accessed and sold these days.
I am not fond of vinyl — I do not miss the pops and clicks, or the way that dust balls would build up in front of the needle and cause the sound to crackle — but those large album sleeves allowed for some nice ly inventive packaging back in the day that cannot be done with CD s. I remember the surprise of opportunity Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. The cover was the surface of one of those old grammar school desks and lifted up like the lid of the desk to reveal the interior. The record was nested inside a slinky pair of pink girl’s paper panties, which you had to slip off to performance the record. Then there was Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, packaged with a fictional small town paper, “The St. Cleve Chronicle.” It was a crafty satire of a provincial newspaper replete with articles, television listings, advertisements, a crossword — even a lascivious connect-the-dots puzzle — all oozing with irony. It read like a novel, with the same characters reappearing in diverse sections.
The Internet offers a excellent way to discover, sample and purchase music, no doubt about it. It’s a excellent improvement over the experience the majority of us have had of buying a new CD  and finding out you only like two of the ten tunes. And the Internet has really better the opportunity for independent artists to reach a expansive r fans than ever before. But in making snap judgments following listening to a snippet of music Web,  all of us  also lose the ability of tunes to grow on us. We’re like children dazzled by neon crayons, and  all of us  risk passing over subtler but richer hues. There’s the danger that music becomes less about artistry and more about commodity.
Still another problem is the lower d audio quality of MP3s, a digital format whereby much of the original audio signal is discarded in order to compress the file size and facilitate digital storage, downloading and other transfers. We’ve sacrificed quality for convenience. I confess, though, I love being able to shuffle tunes on my iPod. The unpredictability keeps the music fresh for me. But it is not in the absence of a price.
As  all of us  increasingly rely on downloadable music, I worry about what  all of us  lose. I still like the experience of going to record stores: the physicality of the merchandise, the role of opportunity and being exposed to something accidentally. Erykah Badu has a marvelous music video of the song “Honey” from her recently released album. An anonymous customer (actually Erykah, but her face is never shown) browses vinyl in a record store, and diverse classic album covers come alive with images of Erykah. It’s a witty video that captures the magic of the experience. The video ends with a message scrolling across the bottom of the screen: “Support your local/regional record store!!!!!” I may n’t have said it better.