Schoolkids-in-Exile RIP.

This am, the radio (Martin Bandyke) had an interview with the owner of
Schoolkids. Not unexpectedly, but still sadly, the announcement was that it
will be closing in the next month or two. Steve Bergman said that it was 
due to the fading profit margin, aka all those of us who are now buying our
music from the on-line legal music services. 

This is sad, because Schoolkids was the first record store I'd ever gone to
in order to find the rare and obscure folk music I'd  finally gotten the 
courage to go out and discover, lo, twenty-five years ago now. It was, for
the longest time, my sine qua non of record stores.

36 responses total.

     ((( Agora #48   <--->   Music #42 )))

It was a little less than nine years ago that Twila announced the 
closing of the original Schoolkids Records store on Liberty St.

(Music2, items #149 & #154    
         or, in link notation: item:music2,149    item:music2,154  )

When the original Schoolkids closed, it generated lots of Grex discussion.
I don't think this second, final, closing will draw much comment
at all.

The saddest comment I have right now is that there is hardly 
anything in the store that I want, even at a deep-discount going-out-
of-business sale.

More later...

I cant remember the last time I bought a CD in a store. I am sure it was
at Borders though because of my discount. 

I have noticed too that every year, Borders as a chain devotes less
space to music. I think that the era of the cd is over and the era of
downloading music is in. Which is fine with me. I also expect that as
those electronic book readers get better, the bookstore might go the way
of the record store. 

We just got five CD decks working but never listen to CDs and never did.  I
bought one CD (recorded by a friend who needed to pay her rent).  They scratch
easily compared to records.

If treated properly, they're *much* easier to take care of than LPs.

The library CDs are almost always badly scratched and parts of them not
playable.  Scratched LPs are usually still playable.  

proof once again that Sindi lives in a Sindi world.

LPs are harder to track though; if only we still used wax cylinders then
things would be even better.

Every time you play an LP, you are wearing it out.  Eventually, it becomes
unplayable.  Not so with a CD.

You can make exact duplicates of CDs, not so much with LPs.

Sindi in resp:6 :: are you talking about CDs from the Ann Arbor 
District Library?   I've had a few scratched-up rock CDs from 
there, but (nearly?) all of the numerous classical CDs I have 
checked out over the last two years have been in fine shape.
Yes, CDs can get scratched up if you don't carry them in their 
cases -- I recall one co-worker who would toss unprotected CDs
in his backpack, yeowch.   But my impression is that the people 
who check out the library's classical CDs handle them well.

Classical CDs from the main library.  Usually one or more tracks are
unplayable.  DVDs also have bad areas, videotapes did not.  CD-Rs have a
finite lifetime because the dye fades.  Tapes even last longer.  I have
records from the 50s that still sound the same as new (which was not so good,
but they have improved since then).  

Sindi?  Dye?  in CD-R's?

People who do not take care of their medium, no matter what that medium may
be, it is not going to wear well over time.  Be it paper, tape, vinyl, or CD.

  Yes, dye.  In CD-Rs.

Okay. But I am all digital now, she says. I rip my CDs to mp3s and carry 
'em all on my little iPod. It is very nice. But I have to say that I 
have CDs that are old and do not have any degradation problems, given that
I always take good care that they are in their cases when they're not 
being played. My older cassette tapes and videotapes have started to 
degrade to the point that I can't use many of them. (And don't even
get me started on eight-tracks.)

What's the best way to preserve DVD-R's of my family home movies?

Do you cassette tapes degrade (oxidize over time) or simply wear out?

I think videocassettes tend to get brittle and stretch.

> What's the best way to preserve DVD-R's of my family home movies?

Make as many copies as you can and distribute them to family members.
Keep making copies. Copying DVDs is lossless so there is no need to
preserve some "master copy". Distribute the copies so that if a disc
ever goes bad, you have plenty of places to borrow a disc from to make
more copies.

There's no way to make a master copy which can be preserved?  What if I have
a stack of DVD-R's I want to keep in a safe for decades?  Do I have to keep
going back to make newer copies?

I don't know Todd. I just think making copies and distributing them is a
pretty good way of making sure they are always available.

What about storing the contents of the DVD-R's on an external hard 
drive. That wouldnt have the same sorts of dye problems

After just a few years you'll take the whole stack and copy it onto a
handful of HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray or whatever) discs.  Then after a few more
years you'll copy that onto a megacapacity disc that can store all the
knowledge in the history of the universe and that can fit up your ass.

 And then, when you need facts to win an argument, you can just pull them
 out of.. 

 Actually, it'll be a lot like things are now..  

Here's where I'm going with this:  You send a CD to the Library of Congress
as part of your copyright process.  Assuming it is music or movie, how do you
know if it will still be preserved in 30 or 40 years?  Call me a scrooge, but
I may not want to give copies to other family members.  At least, not at this
time.

Scrooges can pay for climate controlled safes for preservation. :-)

Will a climate controlled safe do it?

Digression back to music retail:

The Wall Street Journal covers the stranglehold of Wal-Mart, Best Buy
and Target on what is left of CD retailing -- and the news that those
chains are looking to shrink their commitment to slow-selling CDs.
The chains are also difficult to impossible for specialty music
labels to deal with.

The big-box stores now control 65% of music sales, up from 20%
a decade earlier.

"Music Inside The Big Box"
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117763890447584360-FIW3Xw8b3Xl0UYdG3
Jvx60dlqeg_20080426.html?mod=rss_free

The WSJ article will likely only stay available for a short time.
Here is a bloggy summary which should have more persistence:

"Big Box Retailers Not Doing As Crappily As The Rest of the
 Industry -- But They're Getting There"

http://idolator.com/tunes/wal_mart/big-box-retailers-doing-not-quite-as-crappily-as-the-rest-of-the-industry++but-theyre-getting-there-255767.php

-----

And, a recent item which I have now lost reported that many Wal-Mart
stores are going to remove about 20 feet of CD bin space to make room
for iPod accessories.

Good lord! (I don't know that they need to sell that many accessories -- a
good case, some earphones, and maybe some speakers, if you really want 'em,
and you are good to go!)

I guess I am a little less knowledgeable than I thought.  I never really looked
into what the difference was between a CD and a CD-R and why it is able to
write on  a DVD-R.

So a CD or DVD is a longer storage medium because the reflective bumps are 
imprinted in a reflective layer rather than a dye.

Actually, the manufactured CDs are molded/cast with the bumps, then have
the reflective layer deposited on top of that, which is then sealed 
with laquer.  I'm assuming DVDs follow a similar process, but haven't
confirmed it.

The burnable discs are done with a change in a chemical layer.

iirc, the re is someting organic in the cd/dvd buring process which
does make a deterioratoin possible/probable but the details are fuzzy.

I'm not sure how many of you are Apple fans, but if you've seen any of the
Apple Keynotes recently, but iTunes is now directly competing with stores such
as Walmart and Target.  Plus, with EMI now offering DRM-Free high-quality
music, I think a lot of the major labels are going to start extening into the
digital world rather than defending copyrights and suing fans.

There it is in black-and-white, full page ad on Page 1 of the July
issue of Current magazine:  last day for Schoolkids-in-Exile, July 31.

I was in the store for a bit yesterday; bought a copy of the
Archie Shepp jazz album that was playing, and also a recent Hoven
Droven live album.   It may be in jazz that I will miss Schoolkids
the most; much of my jazz collection consists of things I heard
in the store.   In all other fields I have lots of other good 
sources for information.

Steve the owner said he didn't plan to raise
the discount beyond 20%, because then he was losing money on each CD.
He's planning to run a web store with what's left of the stock
after the physical store closes, for a limited time.

My somewhat snarky opinion is that it's about 5-8 years too late
for Schoolkids to be talking about selling CDs via an internet store.
And, if much of the old stock hasn't sold after six months of being
offered in-store at a 20% discount, what is going to make it more
appealing on the web?

New-release CDs are still arriving -- only a 5% discount on those, 
though.  I imagine all the unsold ones can be returned to the wholesaler
after the store closes.

Well, I hope the store has a good blowout during Art Fair.  I'll
probably try to get there every Saturday this month just for nostalgia.

resp:34 "if much of the old stock hasn't sold after six months of being
offered in-store at a 20% discount, what is going to make it more
appealing on the web?"


The main advantage is that people looking for a particular cd might be
able to find him more easily. For not very much money, he might even be
able to use Amazon's service for that. There might be nobody in the Ann
Arbor area who wants to buy a particular cd but there are probably some
people in the USA as a whole who might want it. 

 I'm going to have to agree with Ken on this one -- I don't see any
 likelihood of selling these discs at full price or 20% off through
 an on-line store.  50% off *might* move a lot of them, but shipping
 costs will mean that customers will still be paying something like
 75% of retail costs for a disc priced at 50% off.  
 
 Given that, why not steepen the discount to 33% or some such and
 try to move them locally while there's still a storefront?  It's a
 *lot* of work to list, sell, and ship individual discs.  Unless 
 there's a wholesale operation to take them off his hands or a 
 distributor willing to take them back, I think the Schoolkids in
 Exile owner is crazy if he's going to try selling them individually
 on the web..

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