You know what irritates me as a music fan? There isn’t anywhere around here anymore where you can just go on the day an album is released and know that they will have it. Years ago, you could walk into almost any record store and they would have all of the new releases. They might sell out of something once in a while, sure, but for the most part you could walk into Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or Newbury Comics or Rockit Records, etc, etc, and they would always have all of the new CDs that came out that week. But now there isn’t anywhere you can depend on like that.
You hear all of these people saying not to buy records on Amazon, that you should support small businesses, but it’s pretty hard when you can’t depend on local record stores to automatically have what you’re looking for anymore. The only place I just mentioned that’s still around is Newbury Comics, which has dozens of locations even though they’re technically a privately owned, mom and pop operation.
Well, years ago you could walk into any Newbury Comics location and you would find every single new release 95 percent of the time. (If you went to their locations in Boston and Cambridge, they even had loads of imports that had just been released in England or Japan, etc.). But now you’re lucky if they get 10 of the new albums that come out every week. That’s 10 albums out of 50 or more. They might get seven new albums on CD and eight on vinyl and that’s it. So you can’t just head to the store knowing that you’re going to find what you’re looking for anymore. And that really sucks.
That’s the main reason why I mostly buy music from Amazon. The other reason is that my income is below the poverty level and I simply cannot afford to go to a mom and pop store and pay an extra 10 dollars for an album I can get that much cheaper on Amazon. Just recently I bought an album on vinyl for 38 dollars from a mom and pop store. I had never seen the album on vinyl before so I got excited and bought it. But I came home and looked to see if they had it on Amazon. And they did. And you know how much it was? $17.99. So while I like to support small businesses, I can’t afford to be paying 38 dollars for records you can get on Amazon for less than 20 dollars. If other people have enough disposable income to buy all of their music at small businesses, that’s awesome. But I simply cannot afford to do that. More importantly, you can’t count on small record shops to automatically have what you want anyway. So why go to a record store that probably won’t have what you want and even if they do they want 20 dollars more for it than it costs on Amazon?
Sorry, just something I needed to vent about.
And don’t get me wrong — I still love going to record stores and do buy some records from small businesses. But if there are new releases that I want, I almost always pre-order them on Amazon because they’re a lot cheaper and they usually arrive at your house on the same day they’re released.
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