During the Eighties when I was a student in Cambridge Massachusetts, I'd spend hours browsing the cut-out and used records bins of Cambridge and Boston's many second hand record shops. Harvard Square had 3 or 4 second hand record stores and Kenmore Square in Boston had 5 different second hand music stores at it's peak. None of those second hand stores are still around because the internet pretty much killed the business of music resellers.
I miss the second shops. I discovered the music exotic music of bands like Stereolab, the Cocteau Twins, and Pere Ubu in the $2.99 used and cut-out bins during my shopping expeditions to second hand stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
There's still a single surviving second hand shop left in the St. Louis metropolitan area called Vintage Vinyl, which has been around since the Seventies. The owner tells me business is good and it's probably because Vintage Vinyl is the last surviving retailer of new, used and cut-out records and cds in the St. Louis area. With the exception of Vintage Vinyl, there's no such thing as a retail record store in St. Louis anymore.
All of national and local chain retailers went out business in St. Louis by the mid 2000s because of lost sales to internet retailers and the permanent economic recession that has haunted the Midwestern states since the Bush administration. I always thought the rise of Napster and digital music would result in the downfall of the monster record companies, but as it turns out, the digital revolution resulted in the economic downfall of the humble music store retailer who sat at the bottom rung of the music industry food chain.
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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt
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