CDs were us

Let's start this tale with a morale-boosting moral: even in business, the people who survive are the people who care about things for their intrinsic value first, the money they can make from them second.

Wishful thinking? Who'd have thought, when I wrote my Stars Forever song championing plucky little East 4th Street record boutique Other Music, that it would be mega-retailer Tower Records, directly across the road, that went out of business first? How are the mighty fallen!

Good indie record stores seem to be thriving. In New York, Other Music has expanded, adding a digital download service to their shop and its fantastic newsletter. Last month Rough Trade opened a new store in London, Rough Trade East. It's located at Hipster Central -- Dray Walk, Truman's Yard, just off Brick Lane. According to my mate Daniel Giraffe, it's got "a cafe, a 'snug area', endless amounts of Naim listening facilities and, as the assistant put it to me, loads more stock coming in. For a record shop addict like me, this is wonderful". Meanwhile, in Berlin, my own favourite record shop, Dense, recently moved from Danziger Strasse to prettier quarters on the delightful Oderberger Strasse.

Defining the virtues of boutique record stores in general, Daniel quotes our mutual friend Momo Nonaka: "Momo used to say that in Tokyo, the assistants at some of the better record shops were treated as celebrities... Record shops should be like museums, people's palaces where you go to luxuriate in culture. In Tokyo, one gets the impression, rightly or wrongly, that one is being informed about old and new music, that the main priority is to inform the public first and to sell records second."

Taking off the rosy-tinted spectacles, though, we see that a lot of boutique record shops have gone out of business recently. In London, Smallfish in Hoxton is gone, together with many of the indie record stores on Berwick Street. The BBC quotes David Killington of Mister CD saying "People over 35 are still buying CDs, but no-one under 35 is" -- something I witnessed last weekend. Selling magazines, Playstation games and audio CDs off a stall at the Smart Deli matsuri, I noticed that kids and teens were going straight for the Playstation games and ignoring the CDs altogether. Only over-30s looked at the music CDs. "If these kids represent the future of music CD sales," I thought, "these really are the last days of music on CD".

It's something I look at with equanimity. Last year I got someone to photograph me buying what I had a hunch might be "the last two CDs I'd ever buy" -- albums by Hypo and Yuichiro Fujimoto. That snap ended up illustrating an entry about the demise of music show Top of the Pops. Since then, many of my music-related entries have had an elegiac tone, if they weren't outright obituaries. Music, as a cutting-edge subculture, seemed to be a spent force. Ubiquity was the abyss, and all heroes were marginal and neglected.

So I'm happy that Rough Trade has opened a new store in a location of subcultural significance, with great design values. To be honest, though, even an old music hipster like me will probably just buy a cup of tea and skim a copy of The Wire next time I'm there.



And what about the kids? Well, post-pigs in the pipe, post-baby boom, there aren't so many of them as there were when I was one. So they can't really gang together and have their own serious, important, arty subculture like we did, and see it go mainstream, like we sometimes did. But what they can have is what adults think kids ought to have: toys, and lots of 'em. Racked reports that the East 4th Street Tower Records site will reopen shortly as a branch of Toys'R'Us.