Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the CD industry is trying to drive itself out of business. Yesterday I set out on what I thought would be a twenty-minute mission at max to buy Boxer by The National. It's been long overdue so I was admittedly verging on giddy. Normally the highest level of difficulty I experience in buying a CD is figuring which way the alphabet is running up the racks. Boy, do I wish that had been the case. I visited the soul-sucking Best Buy of the local suburbia only to find two copies of Alligator. No Boxer. Points for having older discs, but wouldn't it be prudent to stock the most current? Surely this was an oversight. On to Target...which, as it turned out, didn't even have the little place marker.
Really? I wouldn't classify The National as obscure indie rock any more. In mere months they went from a suggestion friend to friend to the cover of Paste Magazine, gracing many a "Best of 2007" list. Something's not right.
Finally I stopped into a different Best Buy. Nothing. Where else was there to go? That was (musically) the end of the road for that part of town, and what words of advice were offered to me? "Why don't you just get it online? Get an iTunes card and download it."
Fortunately for CD makers, I'm patient and also due downtown later on where I know exactly where to go to buy an album by a lesser-known band. After an afternoon of chasing my tail and subsequently a nap, it makes me wonder if it would not be easier to just get it off of iTunes. I would like to think that it was just bad timing, that the trucks pulled in after I left, brimming with a fresh stock of discs, but I doubt it. I've long loathed Best Buy for crushing the life out of little independent record stores, so I hold them to the idea that they better do a decent job because in the end all parties-- store, customer, and artist are losing.
Happy MLK day.
1 comment:
Hmm. Grimey's?
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