Virgin Megastores gone

Obviously there are other sources for music now, specifically on the internet, but the closing of Virgin Megastores in the U.S. by summer’s end really is the end of big retail music stores featuring a deep catalog of product. Another large music retailer, Tower Records, closed all of their stores in late 2006. The only remaining exception in the entity, a store with a lot of square footage devoted just to CDs and records, is Amoeba Music with stores in San Francisco, Berkley, and Hollywood. Amoeba Music is certainly different than Virgin, as the employees at Amoeba seem to be enthused about the product and not just there for a job.

The outrageous prices of CDs at Virgin, often at a list price of 18.99, made it less desirable to even those still keeping to the legal side of collecting. Virgin stores were a destination for me for imports that I often didn’t see elsewhere; something like a rare CD by New Zealand’s Mutton Birds on the Virgin label perhaps. I think it was their tie to Europe that brought in the hard to find stuff to the import section. Their music book sections were often pretty good. At the Virgin Megastore in Las Vegas, I once found a book with nothing but mid-60s articles on the Beach Boys' progress towards what became the unfinished "Smile" album.

Smaller independent music retailers remain, but even they seem to be disappearing. Often the response from my music loving friends to a record store’s disappearance is that they don’t darken the door of the places anymore. iTunes has increased the bit rate, Amazon is cheap, trading amongst friends is simple and there is free stuff on the internet, so who needs a building full of music geeks? What is missed is the one on one, the shop talk, and sharing of information. The future may be , as one friend suggested, nonprofit stores for preserving the culture, or as I’ve seen in one place, a shop only open on weekends in a rundown building behind a junkyard. My toddler daughter may never know what record shop is, outside of what the Smithsonian may setup and she will find it to be an odd artifact as she looks at it from behind the glass display window.