Here's the latest news from Schoolkids Records.
For the final two days of the downtown store, "old stock" is 50%
off. The "old stock" is pretty well picked over. "New stock,"
which is generally spring 1998 and later releases, holds at 25% off.
Friday is the final day for the downtown store. I just came back
from my last trip there, with a bag of nine CDs for $60.
A new flyer announces that Schoolkids is going to move operations
to Oz's Music, on Packard. The old stock sale will continue for 40%
off; new stock will be at 25% off.
"See you there!
Stay tuned for more developments!" says the flyer.
247 responses total.
(This continues the previous items on Schoolkids Records, which were summer Agora #151 / Music #149.)
re #2: that didn't seem to do the trick :)
(Nope. I wonder what the right way to do it is.)
Was there buying my lastest stack of CDs and a t-shirt, too
, when there was less than 30 minutes left to go. Saw Steve Bergman
and wished him luck on future endeavers. He seems happy that instead
of dumping the store and getting out, he got to give customers a
great sale and was pleased that all where their to say thank you for
the years he was there. He's got the big task tonight of packing the
remainder of the stock into a Ryder truck and be out by late tonight.
Also saw Matt Watroba (host of WDET's "Folks Like Us") helping out
by clearing out those CD holders from the cash register area, and
talking to costomers--he also signed the last of his CDs to be sold
at the store for a customer.
Is Hootie & the Blowfish forgoten already. a number of their
CDs where still in the racks. Meanwhile, two Squirel Nut Zippers
CDs went into customers hands (only 25% discount) while I was in
front of that rack.
remmers: !clickable or !clickify will bring up some old conference text to coach one through making Backtalk links.
Hootie is one of those cheeserock acts that tends to fade fairly quickly after the people have gotten tired of their music. They're not prettyboy cheese rock, but they're still kinda... poppish.
(Re resp:6 - Thanks, I'll try that the next time I've got a terminal connection to Grex. Unfortunately, one can't run shell commands when connected via Backtalk, and I can't seem to find documentation on clickifying in the web-based Backtalk help...)
This response has been erased.
(Thank you.)
So after I whine about how the demise of Schoolkids means no more local imports, Tower Records in East Lansing gets in a copy of the new Runrig 2-CD anthology from Scotland, and a small stack of Canadian folk-pop imports. This seems to be for a special World Music promotion.
Last week, the new flyers in the old Schoolkids store were from SKR Classical, announcing that the new SKR operations should be open by the end of October. Has anyone been to visit Schoolkids-at-Oz-Music?
What do all you music mavens think of Jim Leonard? I think he's a pompous ass myself.
Well, don't ask me what I think of OZ music... Actually, I don't have that bad an opinion of Oz. He was the guy-who-ran-the-cool-store when I was a broke kid in High School. But now there is a new guy-who-runs-tho-cool-store.
re #13: but pompous asses are one of Ann Arbor's great renewable resources!
Hey, I like him as far as I know him. He pretty much knows exactly what I'm looking for in a recording (crisp, clean, hold the romantic flourishes) and that probably saves me a lot of disappointing purchases. And this despite the fact his personal likes are quite different from mine. He likes to talk but his talks are generally interesting. Did you know he is also our neighbor?
Yes, I know he lives near here. In fact, he almost ran me over one time in his SUV. He didn't want to stop, but being the pedestrian I asserted my right-of-way. This is Ann Arbor, after all. :)
Drives an SUV? OK, so we know he's morally deficient....
<Giggle>
The opening of the Jim Leonard store was promised for late October. Has anyone seen a firm date? (Will there be a sale? :) )
I walked by tonight. The sign on the window says it's opening October 30 (which is tomorrow), with a dance party sometime in the evening (I forget what time). Looking in the window the store didn't look nearly ready to open, but there were several people in there looking as if they were hard at work on getting it ready.
Saturday's Ann Arbor News had dueling record store ads, on page 2 of the Entertainment section. Steve Bergman's Schoolkids Records-in-Exile has now set up shop in the basement of Elmo's T-shirts on Main Street. And immediately above that ad was the ad for Jim Leonard's SKR store. I poked my head briefly in the SKR Liberty St. store on Saturday night. It doesn't really seem like they are ready yet, the store still seems pretty empty.
Eeep! Schoolkids-in-exile is in the Elmo's on State Street; I didn't even know there *was* an Elmo's on State Street, thus my confusion in resp:22 . The new SKR store seemed a little better today -- undoubtedly that's because it was the only shop in Ann Arbor or East Lansing which had the new Sanna Kurki-Suonio album. It still seemed rather devoid of customers, though, compared to Borders.
There's another Schoolkids-in-exile, at Oz's Records on Packard (this claims to be the Blues/Jazz exile, which echoes an historic event of the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Fest in Exile, held in Windsor, Ontario. I know it's true, 'cause I still have a T-shirt.
Haven't been to either, yet.
Having decided to treat myself to a CD-buying spree for my birthday I went out this week with money in hand to buy several new discs and replace one or two that had been scratched. I had several specific discs in mind and a number of possibilities and I was in the mood to buy (or so I thought..) When I got to the record stores, though, I just couldn't bring myself to buy the CDs at $16.99 per. I wound up buying one older release that was marked down to $9.99 at Wherehouse -- I wanted to buy more but I simply couldn't convince myself to part with that much money for CDs. It looks like CD prices have finally passed the threshhold at which I will no longer buy new music that I'm curious about. I might be willing to spend $16.99 on a disc that I knew I'd enjoy for many years but how am I supposed to figure that out? I used to take a chance on a number of discs every month. I'd get some losers but I wound up with many more winners. Now, though, due to my return to school, money's a lot tighter and $17 ($18 with tax!) means a lot more to me. I realize that times are good for a lot of people right now but does that mean that the average shopper is really willing to pay almost $20 for a CD (unless it's a very popular new release) or are CD sales plummeting?
It means that record companies are raking in remarkable profits. CDs cost about $1 to produce in bulk.
It's possible to buy CDs for about $6 from mail order record companies. Plus, of course, the suck-you-in deals are a remarkably cheap way to acquire a dozen or so albums quickly. We got our first CD player in April, and are up to 50 or so CDs by now, with more coming in the mail, and we've yet to spend a lot of money.
Yeah, if you have the will to deal with them, Columbia and BMG are good deals. THe thing to do is to get the load of free CDs right at the start, then buy the number you need to buy to complete your commitment. They will try to get you to buy more (offering "3-for-1" deals and stuff like that), but you have to be fiurm and send back all the postcards, and any discs they send you by mistake. THen quit as soon as you've bought what you need to buy. You might have to be insistent about quitting. But once you really are out, sometimes they'll send you a signup form, including a batch of new CDs, right away.
BMG appears to be the better of the lot. Usually you get 12 for the price of 1, and you have to buy only 1 to fulfill your commitment. I am a member and I have no complaints. You just have to pick your moments. I just took advantage of a buy 1 get 3 free deal. I'm getting 4 cd's for about $28, and I know I couldn't do that well in the record stores.
I'm not a big buyer of CDs, but I get the same feeling when I wander around Border's and see a price of $12.95 or more on a relatively thin paperback. I'd buy a bunch more books if somehow they could get the price down to $8 or $10 per copy, even if some of them turned out to be disappointing. Part of the problem is that it's just plain expensive to be in business. Border's probably has a pretty hefty rent to pay for that space downtown (as well as in malls all over the country) and they have to pay their employees, too. There's an incredible amount of overhead in stocking books and moving them around the country. That's why I think publishing (of both books and music) is going to move inexorably toward electronic distribution. After all, you're not buying the actual book or CD, you're buying the words or the music. If you could do that without all the middlemen, the end product would be a lot cheaper. I don't know how close we are yet, and publishers will put up a fight, but we'll get there in my lifetime.
re #28-30: the BMG and Columbia record companies generally don't offer the music I want. They're fine if you want reasonably mainstream stuff and are willing to deal with selection from a (reasonably large but still) limited menu. For every little bit your tastes are out of the mainstream (or perhaps out of the *mainstreams* since there seem to be several parallel tracks) the value of the service BMG and Columbia offer declines dramatically.
What mcnally said. I did buy from BMG once, but it was hard finding 10 things I actually wanted out of their catalog.
Oh, I totally agree with that-- it seems BMG and Columbia rarely had what I wanted, unless I happened to like an artist that's currently popular (and that's rarer still).
I just ordered six CDs from CDnow, for a grand total price of$99.18, including shipping and handling. Some of those CDs are hard to find (Such as "Sky Moves Sideways" by Porcupine Tree), so all in all, I'd say it was a good deal. There is also a used CD place over the web that I found too, but their system was so slow I couldn't be bothered.
It's true that BMG and Columbia House don't havev everything. Now that they are on the web, though, it's easier to see just what they do have. (The catalogs they send are much smaller than their total inventories.)
I recently visited the revived SKR store, located where Schoolkids used to be. The place is noticably raw - it's like all the atmosphere moved out with Schoolkids, and left just the CD's behind. But the CD's are all in the same places where they used to be, so old Schoolkids fans should have no trouble finding their favorite music, and though the CD racks are a bit thinner than they were, they aren't bad, and will presumably improve. The "new releases" racks by the doors are missing, as are the little cards with in-house music reviews that I liked so much. Maybe the staff has been too busy putting the store back together to review any new music. I talked to a couple employees, who both seemed to be former Schoolkids people with their hearts in the right place. I spent a mess of money to endorse the project (well, I didn't buy anything I didn't want).
Yeah, the new Schoolkids, with its folding tables and lack of decoration, seems quite uninviting. I'm assuming that's temporariy, or hoping so, anyway. Er, that should be SKR, not Schoolkids.
Re. 26: It's the classic law of supply/demand. Because the economy is up there right now, most people /are/ willing to shell the extra bucks. It's like that in other areas of entertainment spending, as well. The average price to go see a flick is $7. Considering the avg. movie is 1:40 min., you'd think most people wouldn't spend that much. But they do. I work with someone who thinks nothing of paying $7 for a show. That includs taking the family along! Personally, I think such prices are outrageous. I won't spend $17 on CD's, nor $7 on movies (exceptions: Nest year's SW movie or Trek movies).
Well, hmmm. I pay $17 for CDs on a regular basis, since most of the CDs that I want aren't the kind that you can just pick up at Best Buy. In fact, now that Skids is gone, I've had to troll net sites to find places to feed my addictions. (Though the last five or so CDs that I got were not bought.) I figure that $17 is not a bad price. On movies, well, we very rarely go to them. We will rent, or go to matinees, but never pay full price unless it's a rare event.
If there is a movie I really want to see, I ususally wait untill it comes out at the Fox, a local second-run theater.
I love my Borders dsicount.
Colombia, from what I understand, actually does have a really good selection....both in music and videos.....and I know somebody who on a pretty regular basis getss really good deals from them....like 3.00 cds and such.
Interesting. I've found them to be more ixpensive. Plus they bug you like crazy to order more stuff. Very annoying.
Keep in mind (for those of you who like to "support" the artist whose music you're buying) the record club purchases actually cost the artist money in royalties. They are considered to be a promotional expense and the burden of cost is placed on the artist. It's sick; if it were a regular store purchase the artist might make a buck or so in royalties, but if it's a record club purchase the artist will pay a few dollars in royalties.
Really? That's atrocious.. On the other hand, if we could get everyone in the world to order a Michael Bolton CD from BMG maybe we could solve that problem once and for all.. :-)
How about a Spice Girls or Hanson CD?
re #45: I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. People like Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, etc. will get by somehow, and that's the music I buy via record clubs. I think it's very difficult to argue these people are losing anything through any form of promotion in which they participate.
I've re-joined BMG and considering I can get CD's for 6 bucks (+ s/h) vs. 15, I don't feel bad about it either.
I find that I don't want to make any of the artists I normally buy lose money, since none of them are big stars (tm) anyhow... I do admit to not worrying about folks like, oh, Madonna, but I still worry...
A word about music bought from record clubs: I once had a terrible time re-selling some music bought from a record club -- Because they had been bought from a record club! The only place that would accept them was School Kids Annex, and then only for a greatly discounted price. Apparently this was all because of moral (?) objections to those companies. Anyone else have some insite into this phenominon? Aside from the fact that they were rotten CDs to begin with...
How did these stores know the CDs in question were bought from record clubs? Re#48: Yeah, that's my opinion basically - the music I buy from record clubs tends to be from well-known, well-established mainstream artists, and I don't feel that bad about losing them a few dollars. The bands which I _would_ be concerned about costing them extra money? - well, I can't buy their music from record clubs anyway...
The record club CDs typically have a little box printed into the sleeve graphics somewhere saying "manufactured for xxx", or something like that.
Really? Hmm...never noticed that...
With BMG, you'll find it with the UPC on the back.
Oh yeah. I read packages with great interest, mostly because it's there and it's something to read. I suppose the music stores won't repurchase the recordings, or do so at much lower prices, because collectors can be finicky. In the world of comics, the ones that sell for higher prices than the cover are the ones sold in the comic book stores, without a UPC barcode. Now I know there's not as high of a demand for music recordings, and there isn't a definitive way to limit them, but-- I still think music stores figure their clients won't want to buy recordings with the BMG or Columbia marketing labels. I think Dan's right-- most of the artists that advertise in record clubs are very mainstream and are making *quite* a bit of money. They can probably afford it; they get paid from other sources-- music videos, MTV show appearances, arena concerts, etc. But I could be wrong. Musicians aren't as rich as you'd expect since they generally put their money back into equipment, anyway.
According to an acquaintance who has worked in the record business in promotion & office support: In the old days, record clubs such as BMG were not given access to the best analog master tapes for their manufacturing runs, so the record club LPs were not as good. This continued into the early CD era, even though it made no sense in a digital era, just because it was the way business was done. I've lost touch with this acquaintance, so I can't see if the record labels and record clubs have gotten smart enough to exchange digital masters. I know I prefer not to buy record club products when I buy used discs -- just call it a silly prejudice. I suppose some ambitious grexer could pick up pairs of "regular" CDs and record club CDs and examine the bit streams to see if they are the same.
Funny you should mention that. I compared a segments from an ELO CD produced by Jet Records, and from CH using Sound Forge. Both patterns were exactly the same.
The data, or the analog waveforms? The waveforms would look identical unless there were some really audible differences between the two sources. (I've got an old vinyl copy of "Who's Next" from some kind of record company "nice price" series. It has an actual dropout in the middle of one of the tracks!
It's probably a lot easier to read the tracks to digital audio files and diff them than it is to do any sort of waveform comparison so I'd assume that he was comparing digital to digital..
Quite correct, Mike.
I do own a few record club CDs and they sound OK. Any difference is probably very small.
I'm bummed by the latest Ann Arbor music casualty -- the Wherehouse records on South University has closed and, despite the sign on their door proclaiming their "hope" that they will re-open in Ann Arbor, I doubt they will.. They had a good indie section which was stocked by a knowledgable buyer and their prices were pretty decent if you either hit them on Tuesday when they had a standing $2.00-off sale or talked them into giving you the discount on other days (my usual m.o.)
I'm sorry to hear about that. I didn't go there much but knew others who did. It would be interesting as a project to make a list of all the music stores, new and used. Unforunately, we might then be able to strike them off, one by one. Has anyone been to the 'new' Schoolkids at OZ's? Do they have anything in stock or is it basically a front for an ordering service?
I've been to the new S'kids in the basement of Elmo's - they do have stuff in tock, but not nearly as much as they used to. I haven't been out to the one at OZ's yet.
So there are *two* Schoolkids, now? That sounds bad; the owner could go crazy just trying to flip back and forth between them.
I think there's also one in one of the stores on Main between Liberty and William. I'm very confused by the whole "Schoolkids in exile" thing -- there seems to have been some sort of diaspora..
The store on Main is Collected Works. That's where all the folk stuff is supposed to end up, but it's not the world's biggest selection (yet). I've been to the one under Elmo's, and to the Collected Works store, but not to the one at Oz's. Seems that I've done more S'kids shopping via the net (email) than in person these days.
My statement on #45 (Artists paying for record club purchases) is no longer correct in most modern contracts, as far as my recent research shows. They do pay for the cost of the record (CD, jewel box, insert, etc) just like with any other CD, they just take 50% of their normal royalty (which to this day is based on wholesale cost of an LP! Yes, I mean vinyl record!)
According to the sign posted in the window: Schoolkids-in-Exile-at- Elmo's is moving down the street to become Schoolkids-in-Exile-at-Bivouac.
They just don't sit still, do they?
Pretty soon it will be Schoolkids-in-Exile-in-a-Friend's-Basement . . . .
Maybe Grex can rent it some space.
Ann Arbor school children can make up a game of "Hide the Schoolkids"
I think Schoolkids should move into my basement, too. I've been to Schoolkids@bivouac, and I've got to say like them. I ordered a CD on Friday, and it came in today. I ordered one at SKR P&R, and I've been waiting over three weeks for it.
After Mooncat's Grex Happy Hour on Friday I stuck my head in to check out "Schoolkids in Exile at Collected Works." The rumor I'd heard was that this was supposed to be where most of the folk music ended up, but only a small fraction of what was there was folk-ish. I'm happy to hear that Schoolkids-in-Exile's business model of relying a lot on special orders is working well for cloud. I remember Steve Bergman talking about how the financial situation necessitated working closely with "one-stop" suppliers, and this had the beneficial effect of getting most special orders in within one day. This will be a tremendous improvement over the old special order situation at Schoolkids -- which sounds like it is continuing with the SKR shop -- which is that you make your special order and it's something like putting a message in a bottle. My last special order at SKR Classical, which was a well-promoted CD from the large independent label Chandos, took FIVE MONTHS to arrive. Even with a promise of next-day delivery, special orders just aren't going to work for me. Making that second trip downtown to pick up the order is a nuisance for me. If I can't grab a particular disc in town, I'd just as soon order it from one of the big online services. The growth of CD Now and its competitors leaves me wondering how many people are willing to do special orders any more.
Well, Schoolkids-in-Exile also, if I remember right, give a bit of a discount on anything you have to special order; and in any case you don't pay the exorbitant shipping and handling. So they'll have a bit of an advantage in the special order department over other physical stores.
Yes, Dan, they did give me a discount too. From over 16 dollars origonally, to less than fifteen, including tax. I was well pleased, and I think that they should be able to rely on me as a fairly regular customer from here-on out. BTW; my CD from SKR has come in, finally, but I haven't had the chance to pick it up yet.
I've also been very happy with the new discount policy on S'kids special orders, although most of mine have taken a bit longer to get in than next day or even next week (but then I have some pretty specialized tastes, sigh... which make it rather daunting at times to find what I'm looking for in Real Stores...) but I haven't actually ordered anything from them since last year.
So I was at both Schoolkids-in-Exile at Bivouac, and SKR, yesterday, and maybe I'm making my peace with both stores. SKR is still thin on stuff which appeals to me, but on leaving the store I noticed that they had the new release from the Old Joe Clarks mentioned on the new-release board, so I went back in for that. (Who are the Old Joe Clarks? An alt.country-ish band whose debut album was close to the top of my best-of-1997 list. Review to come this week, I hope.) SKR was also playing the "country/sitar" album by Bingo which got an interesting review in the new issue of "No Depression." I would have bought that, but they were out of stock... we'll see how many weeks it takes for them to find me a copy. Schoolkids-in-Exile is starting to recover some of that feeling that the old Schoolkids had, that if you dug around you would find all sorts of interesting items. I settled for a Johnny Cash anthology I had not seen, and for the Michael Nyman soundtrack for "Ravenous." Interesting note: Schoolkids-In-Exile is competing seriously on price. Their price on "Ravenous" was $3 cheaper than the other shops I had checked. They had some Runrig discs from Scotland for only $14.
Someone should bar them from using the name "Schoolkids" if they are, in fact, pricing things competitively. Isn't that, like, false advertising? :-)
<laughs> Only if they also sue Discout "we have the most expensive used disks in town" Records.
<laughs>
Orinoco, what is Discount charging for used discs?
Well, I seemed to remember they had pretty high prices. I went back again recently, and they still had the sign up saying they bought used discs, but I couldn't find the used-discs-for-sale section. Very mysterious.... ...course, I didn't look very hard, being as I really don't like dealing with Discount.
It's not big at all, and it's mostly junk. Dan, are you still bitter that they wouldn't sell you that old warped record?
Well, yeah, there's that too...
So Schoolkids-in-Exile surprised me by having the new Runrig album in stock -- it's a Scottish import, and now that Runrig have been dropped by EMI, the band is back on their own label, Ridge. And I liked the African compilation which was playing in the store, AFRICAN SALSA by the Earthworks label, so I had Steve sell it to me right out of the player. Just like old times. Schoolkids-in-Exile is now established on my regular weekend circuit downtown.
I got some e-mail today telling me that one of my favorite folk CD shops will be no more. House of Musical Traditions is discontinuing their CD department to make more room for their instrument sales. Like Elderly Instruments, HMT sold both recordings and instruments; unlike Elderly, which has expanded ferociously over the years, HMT is stuck in a small house in a thriving urban neighborhood, Takoma Park, Maryland, and there is no place for them to expand. I was introduced to HMT around 1985 by Bruce Schneier, who recommended it to me at a ConFusion SF convention. I got there just in time to vacuum up all sorts of wonderful gems from the 1980s glory period of British Isles folk, LPs which are now rare and expensive collectibles. I got most of the early Oyster Band albums there, the English Country Blues Band, Pyewackett, many of my Malicorne LPs too. Almost all my Breton folk albums came from there. House of Musical Traditions ran the best import folk LP & CD store that I have ever seen -- well, maybe they were not quite as good as San Francisco's Down Home Music, but I don't get to San Francisco very often, and I managed to visit HMT once or twice a year. In recent years, HMT adopted a generous preview policy, and also moved into used CDs. So I'd visit the store when I made trips to my parents' home in Annapolis; spend a couple of hours there rummaging and listening, and come back to Michigan with a giant stack of music which just wasn't available here. Online & mail order is nice, but sometimes it's no substitute for in-store browsing. However, for import folk music, mail order is about all I have left. Mad's Records in Ardmore, PA, is the only store left in my regular orbit which stocks more than a token selection of import folk CDs. Mad's is nice, but it was never as good as HMT. The last sad irony is that we skipped our planned trip to the store in December 1998; we just ran out of time.
Ann Arbor note: a Media Play store is going into the old Best Buy space at Oak Valley Mall.
Re #90: It's about time.
And on the heels of Media Play: Harmony House is moving in on State Street, taking the former location of Elmo's T-Shirts. This Harmony House store will be about two door down from Discount Records. How many CDs can this city buy?
Does anyone actually *buy* CDs at Harmony House? My impression, based on the selection and pricing in the stores I've visited, was that they'd somehow figured out to make money by *not* selling records..
HH is somewhat overpriced, and you can usually cound on them not to have what you're looking for. I think I'll stay with BMG.
In Lansing, before the advent of Where House Records' classical section, and Tower Records, Harmony House was the most useful local resource for classical music, and they also tended to have some indie rock stuff which other Lansing stores did not have. Harmony House's all-classical shop in Royal Oak is still a useful resource. My impression is that this store is larger than SKR Classical or Tower's classical department, and it often has stuff which we don't see in Ann Arbor. But I don't see how Harmony House is going to put a store which will be comptetitive in Ann Arbor in the small Elmo's space.
With 3 other records shops (not counting Wazoo and Encore) within one block of the new HH location, there's no way the new location could compete. It would have to be really special to get my business.
Out here in the oh-so-sophisticated San Francisco Bay Area, there's essentially no worthwhile outlet for classical CDs except Tower. Fortunately Tower is pretty good.
SKR and SKR classical are offering a 20% discount through September with the presentation of a student ID from Michigan or EMU. This does me no good, but a few of you may be able to benefit.
I was in SKR today, hoping to pick up "69 Songs", the new 3-disc
Magnetic Fields collection (which came as an almost complete surprise
to me, I'd heard no advanced hype and the only information I had that
anything new was due was from talking to band member Claudia Gonson
after a show last year when she said something vague about "something
due out next fall.") Unfortunately they'd sold out of the limited-edition
boxed set -- apparently the band's area shows over the past couple of years
have built up more of a local following than SKR expected..
Since I'd been lured into SKR, though, I decided to buy Richard Thompson's
"Mock Tudor" and the Talking Heads' re-issued "Stop Making Sense"..
I then went on to several other record stores to see whether I could find
the Magnetic Fields box at any of them. I didn't, but I somehow wound up
walking out of Tower with a Kinks album, a T. Rex album, a collection of
Astor Piazzola's tangoes, an afro-pop collection, and a compilation by
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as well as a promo CD sampler.
All I can say is: I hope that Magnetic Fields release is *really* good
because it's already cost me a bundle and I don't even have it yet.. ;-)
For those who're looking to try something different, Tower is having a
sale of the "Music Club" collection series and have a display on the end
of one of their aisles. They have collections by influential early ska
acts Desmond Dekker and Toots & the Maytals, a decent early ska collection
("This is Ska",) and an excellent classic dub collection ("Dub Chill Out")
as well as several other interesting picks.
I *highly* recommend the "Dub Chill Out" collection. It's very accessible
classic dub by the greatest masters of the genre -- King Tubby, Lee Perry,
Augustus Pablo, Scientest, King Jammy, etc..
I'm hearing lots of good stuff about the Magnetic Fields box set. I think I'll wait till I see them live next week before I invest. (I assume they'll be playing a lot of the new stuff.)
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Interesting responses there. ;-)
re 98: just U of M and EMU, another school id wouldnt suffice? I still use my MSU id when I want student discounts even though its been about a year.
I just report what the sign says. If you want to try to argue with the staff about your MSU ID, be my guest.
This is the week that the "Michigan Money Saver" coupon books are handed out around U of M's campus.. They contain both a $3 coupon for Tower (good through the end of the year) and a 20% off coupon for SKR, so if you're a frequent Ann Arbor music shopper (and as as miserly as I am when it comes to music spending..) you'll want to take a stroll near campus this week and grab one (or more..)
Another independent music store bummer.. I was in Grand Rapids over the weekend and went out of my way to stop at my favorite west-Michigan music store, Vinyl Solution. I was very distressed to find an empty storefront where it used to be, and no new location listed in directory information. Vinyl Solution was an excellent independent record store (especially if you consider that it was in Grand Rapids, which isn't a notably musical town..) and I'll miss it. In the past couple of years Ann Arbor has lost its two most adventurous independent stores, Schoolkids' and Wherehouse (technically Wherehouse is part of a small Michigan chain, I guess), Grand Rapids has lost Vinyl Solution, and even Grand Haven has lost its little music store (a small but reasonably eclectic place called "Dan's Compact Music") What's driving all of these stores out of business? Is it the record companies? the Internet? the big music chains and places like Best Buy?
It's a combination of all of the above. Smaller stores can't afford to undercut prices as much as the big dealers. Internet companies can offer great deals since they don't need stores. All they need are warehouses, and some probably just deal directly with the record companies, further undercutting costs. We're also dealing with megastores that combine several stores at once (Media Play, Best Buy and Circuit City springs to mind). Smaller stores that only offer one kind of product (music, books, clothes) have a harder time of surviving that the big department stores. That's why Arborland doesn't have small stores anymore. That's why the Ann Arbor Rd. area is being built up with huge stores. Small specialty stores just can't survive in this environment.
In my experience the independent stores usually have *better* prices than places like Tower and Virgin mega-stores.. However, I can see a lot of their business being drawn away by places like Best Buy, which offer much more competitive prices (if also a much less adventurous selection.)
I think what most small business consultants advise is to strongly emphasize better and more personalized service, as well as a distinctive and possibly unique product line. If a business can carve a particular niche that can appeal to enough people, then even the smaller ones can survive. For example, I learned rather fast that it's not a good deal to buy used music at a regular or even discount store. I started going to a small business dealing in used music, and the tapes and CDs were in much better condition, and were cheaper.
I've learned that the used music from the used CD shop on South U. is cheaper than used CDs at Tower. I can't remember it's name though. If I can't find something special at Encore, I usually go there.
(Record Exchange?)
Yes, Record Exchange.
For what it's worth, Wherehouse isn't a small local chain: it's a national one, and not a very good one. When they first showed up here, in the early 70s before the advent of Tower, they were pretty good, but Tower sucked most of their lifeblood away.
Actually, these stores were "Michigan Wherehouse Records", which I'm pretty sure wasn't related to the much-bigger "the Wherehouse" national chain.. I agree that the national "Wherehouse" chain is unexceptional.
The A2 Wherehouse had some good import and limited edition CDs that I never saw anywhere else.
Yes, the small Michigan chain and the West Coast chain hit on the same name at about the same time back in the 1970s, and I presume they reached an agreement to stay out of each others territory and avoid lawsuits. The printed materials for our chain almost always say "Michigan WhereHouse Records," like the receipt I got there yesterday. The Lansing phone book lists just three outlets for them here, and I think I've heard of a couple of others around the state. As we've mentioned, the Michigan WhereHouse store in Ann Arbor closed about a year ago. In East Lansing, the Michigan WhereHouse store near the MSU campus had a near-monopoly on CD sales for over a decade, with competition only from the State Discount convenience store selling the top hits, and the two used CD shops. It will be interesting to see how long the MSU operation can hold out in the face of the Tower store down the street. It's only a small Tower store, but it's still bigger and better stocked than any music store which has been in East Lansing in the last 25 years. In WhereHouse's favor: East Lansing is not as overbuilt for CD retail space as Ann Arbor is.
I'd be interested, if you wind up shopping in both the Ann Arbor and East Lansing Tower stores, if you get any feeling that Tower is pricing things lower in East Lansing until their competition is gone. Their prices in Ann Arbor have gone up significantly and I'm wondering whether it's because their near-by competition has dropped off or whether it's just a chain-wide price increase..
Really? How recent is "recently"? I'd noticed pretty low (for tower) prices when I shopped there a few weeks ago.
Regular CD prices now reach $18 at Tower. I'd hardly call that "pretty low."
blech! $18 for a CD? What a ripoff, especially if it's standard length..
Maybe I'd hit Tower during a sale and not realized it.
They often have some sort of sale going on but otaking's correct -- regular prices on full-price discs are often $17.99, which is ludicrous. New titles are generally "on sale" for around $13.99 when they first come out, and back-catalog titles range from $11.99 to $15.99 when they're not on sale ($7.99 to $11.99 when they are..)
Ah, that's what it was, then. I was on an expedition to buy the albums that I wouldn't be able to borrow from my parents anymore, so everything I bought was a back-catalog title.
Mike in resp:117 :: Well, I bought two overpriced CDs at the East Lansing Tower yesterday, both priced at $16.99. But these were obscure world music titles, from Orchestra Nationale de Barbes and MacUmba. My recollection is that the East Lansing Tower moved to $17.99 on "front-line" discs at about the same time that Ann Arbor did.
Even BMG hasn't begun to charge $18 for CDs. Then again, you have to pay S&H through them.
But if you only catch the sales, you can save money.
that's assuming you like their selection, don't mind waiting for the sales, etc., basically just to pay a less-unreasonable-than-normal price.. of course you also have to worry about whether the artist (presumably the only other party to the transaction that you care about) is making any money off the record-club sale or whether they're actually being *charged* for it by the record company as some sort of "promotional expense"
The problem with BMG is their relative lack of selection. I find a lot of mainstream stuff that I don't mind picking up, but most of the stuff I like isn't available since they only carry major labels. In some cases, like Kate Bush, you're lucky if they carry a couple of albums beyond a greatest hits CD. If only there was a CD club that sold a lot of world, techno, goth, industrial, ambient...
no kidding. But unfortunately, that still seems to be somewhat of a cult market, or an audience that is significantly smaller than the mainstream. Hey, has anyone considered buying wholesale? I subscribe to _Sound and Vision_ and I keep seeing ads for a wholesale company that is *not* BMG or Columbia House. the only other way to find something like that is to start your own CD club, somehow.. you'd have to be an entrepeneur, then..
$17.99 CDs? Gee, I guess the industry must really want MP3's to succeed. ;)
No kidding.. As far as I can tell the industry is doing everything it can to alienate music buyers -- dropping any older artists who aren't superstars, spending very little money and effort on developing new artists and new sounds, gouging every last penny they can, etc.. (but then you've all heard me bitch about these things before..)
What, if anything, has taken the place of the 45 rpm single of the vinyl era? I see things called "CD singles" for sale, but they're far too expensive, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the cost of a full-length CD, for me to imagine buying a fistful casually the way kids used to buy 45s in my day. Or is my sense of price off, and CD singles really do move as fast and casually as 45s used to?
Many of the ridiculously-priced CD singles you see have more music on them than a 45 single. The usual routine seems to be one or two album tracks, and a few 'not available anywhere else' B-sides.
Yeah, there're basically two kinds of "CD singles" --
kind A, which sells for $5.99 - $7.99 usually has a popular song
and several other tracks, possibly "bonus remixes" or otherwise
unreleased songs.
kind B, which is far less common, sells for $2.99 or $3.99 and
usually has a huge hit song plus one B-side, just like the 45rpm
singles used to..
Neither kind really replaces the old 45rpm single, though..
Many artists don't release singles at all and of those who do, the
singles usually come out substantially after the album release,
sometimes not until well after the song has faded from the hit parade..
On the whole, record companies would much rather sell you a whole
album's worth of songs..
Perhaps "singles" will come back in the era of downloadable digital
music. One of the factors working against them at the moment is that
it costs just as much to produce a CD-single as it does to produce a
full-length CD (more, actually, on a per-disc basis, since you'll sell
far fewer of them but still have to pay for packaging, design, etc..)
resp:134 As long as DJs are in demand, especially in making these bonus mixes, I really don't see the demise of the CD single coming quickly.
Actually, I adore the singles. :) When I was up in Toronto, the price of cd's was incredible....a basic cd would be $15....Canadian. Tower had Sarah McLachlan's Mirrorball on sale for $10.99...canadian. I saw others on sale for @8.99 or $9.99.....and since I bought 100 Canadian dollars for only 74 American.....man oh man were the prices nice!!!! :)
I need to shop in Canada more often. A collection of Shania Twain videos sells for CAN$8. Tower charges US$10. Imagine what used CDs would cost in Windsor...
<drools> All the more reason my friend Eric needs to go to Montreal and let me visit him there. :)
Wow! Record prices have come down since the last time I shopped in Canada. Prices were CDN$18-20 per disc at that time and the Canadian dollar was doing significantly better against the American dollar.
Even if CDs were CDN$18, it would still be cheaper than the US$18 that Tower charges. Sure, you still have to consider the extra GST & PST, but it would still be worth it in the long run.
Plus, if you have the patience to wait in line at the border, you can get the GST back. :)
That's true. You better make sure to save all of your receipts and ensure that they all have the date and location of where you bought the stuff. You have to prove that you bought it in Canada.
We do that every year on the way back from Canada, but that's because if you're living there for three weeks the expenses add up. The GST saving on a few CDs would almost not be worth the effort.
Yeah, but if I made the trip, I'd want it to be worthwhile, considering the cost of the drive and border crossings. I'd buy a whole stack of CDs or books.
Buy enough, though, and you run into the limits of your duty exemption.. Anyway, my thinking was that CD prices in Canada would have kept pace with, or risen faster than, U.S. prices.. Apparently they've gone from being somewhat higher to quite a bit lower..
It's not like I plan to buy $300 worth of CDs. It would be nice, but I can't afford that.
Be thankful you're not buying your CDs in the UK. Back in 1992 I saw a stack of American rock imports at the Piccadilly Circus outlet of Tower for 20 _pounds_ a crack. I could have brought over a stack and sold them to friends at less than that, and still made myself a tidy profit.
I found some really good CDs in the London Tower store when I went. They had a decent bargain bin that was worth raiding. I came away with a Ryuichi Sakamoto CD single and a limited edition Peel Sessions of Siouxie and the Banshees for 2 pounds. The regular CDs cost 15 pounds, or roughly $24. Too much for me.
<nods> British CD prices are ridiculous. I always assumed that 'imports' (usually from Europe) are so high-priced here because prices are so high in Europe, but #147 makes it sound like there's a worse markup going across the Atlantic the other direction. Hmm...
I figure it's yet another disadvantage of socialist policy in the economy.
While doing Christmas shopping downtown, I stopped in on the new Harmony House store. Maybe they hadn't finished stocking it yet. But it didn't even meet the standards I expect from a Harmony House store, in terms of stock, and it's hard to see how it's going to survive near the corner of State and Liberty, with at least 7 other CD shops within one block distance.
If my experience with other Harmony House stores is any indication, they'll expect to make up for their small selection by charging extra for the things they do stock..
I thought the row of computers with music site bookmarks was a nice touch, but that was about all HH had to reccomend it when I stopped in a few days ago.
If I remember the ad correctly, SKR is doing a stores-wide sale, 20% off most everything in all three or four stores, for this weekend. Has anyone investigated SKR's new store "Dubplate Pressure," which replaces the old Schoolkids Annex? The new store seems oriented entirely towards club DJs, I think. I don't seem to speak the language there.
And I had a Dickens of a time figuring out what the "Dubplate Pressure" logo read.
re #154: (?!)
(Dubplate Pressure is/was a vinyl store that is/was located
beneath some running store [Tortoise & Hare?] on Liberty.
same building as Dinersty, as I recall. I *hope* it's not an
SKR acquisition.)
(my experience from shopping there two years back: definitely
more for club DJs, with occasional hip-hop tracks. LOTS of
DJ competition videos. the guys running the place seemed to
be in it for the music rather than for the money.)
It seems to be part of the SKR family now. There was an article a month or two ago about it; the idea was to keep the same guy but lighten the admin load on him.
I've never been in, because they seem to favor vinyl and I don't have a turntable.
A response unlikely to interest anyone except Twila and maybe David Bratman: Cruising the Usenet folk music newsgroups, I came upon the news that ADA Music has been sold. ADA is one of the two largest distributors of folk music in the UK, and since about 1990 they had been my primary source for British Isles and European folk music. I'd heard from a friend that the proprietor had been sick. The fill rate on my orders had been declining -- it used to be that any folk CDs which ADA couldn't get, you had to mail order direct from the band. And ADA only managed to get out one catalog flyer in all of 1999. The last straw was that ADA was not available via the Internet, at all. In the early 1990s I didn't mind getting up at 0500 to telephone England -- I enjoyed chatting with the owner and gossiping about various albums and artists -- but by the late 1990s it was getting hard to get up so early just to order CDs, and then the owner started trying to discourage small-order phone calls because it was taking up too much of his time. More of my business was shifting to companies with an Internet presence. The new ADA already has a small web page up. I hope it's just a teaser; I'm not finding much of interest on it. Sigh sigh sigh. I will miss those early morning phone chats.
Dubplate Pressure, the techno/DJ operation which was acquired by SKR, has closed. (resp:154, resp:156 above.) The techno stuff has been moved into the main SKR store and it's 50% off. The storefront is being cleaned out; I don't know if SKR has future plans for it.
(damn. and two weeks before I return to A2, too...)
haha skr will never be the same and they will dissapear.
That store has closed ALREADY?? Damn... I knew one of the guys who helped run the place - he's a music director at WCBN - and he was so excited when it opened up. He must be really upset now. Too bad.
Mike Perini> ???
Carlos Souffrant, a.k.a. "the Dark Lord of House."
Oh ok. Mike worked for wcbn too, I think he still may.
Yeah, he does. Though he's not a music director.
Maybe so, but since I did in fact work with him at Schoolkids, you can see from whence my confusion derived...
Well yeah, you could hardly be expected to know the incredibly elaborate and baroque power structure at WCBN... :)
Well, I also have a friend that used to be the receptionist there, but theres no way that you would know that either. Heh.
There's a receptionist at WCBN?
Maybe it was U of M
perhaps there *is* someone with the title "receptionist", but under the incredibly elaborate and baroque power structure perhaps their duties are something else entirely..
I would have thought WCBN would have more of a psychedelic power structure. Or indie, perhaps. Certainly not baroque.
i adore mike perini i cant believe you know him carla! i was in the fantastiks witgh him
WCBN is like Gormenghast, vast, gloomy, mysterious, full of those who lust for power, and those who covet what they cannot possess, which may explain what happened to the Richard Thompson box set. Mike Perini is a nice guy, yes.
Time to write another record store obituary. Where House Records in East Lansing is closing on May 6, as the students depart. The month-long 30% off sale should have tipped me off. What's left in the store is 40% off, but the pop/rock stuff has been pretty well combed over. There's a lot left in the classical bins, though, and some in the world music bins. Where House's MSU store opened around 1978 in the University Mall on MAC Avenue, and it moved twice over the years until it settled into the Jocundry's Books building about five? years ago. Where House was originally the cooler record store in town after the demise of The Disc Shop; one of my memories from the 70s is making a distinct pest of myself returning about every third LP that I bought in the oil-shock era of blighted vinyl quality. In the mid-80s the Discount Records chain pulled out of East Lansing, and this left Where House with a near-monopoly on the Michigan State campus CD trade. They didn't do well with this, however, as the selection got less and less interesting. I lived in East Lansing through this period, and I would generally resort to mail order, or to shopping on trips, for anything I wanted which was at all obscure. A MSU acquaintance who was on the Bitnet ALLMUSIC mailing list would regularly write entertaining rants about the cluelessness of the staff and the insufficiency of the stock. They rallied a little bit in the early 1990s, opening a classical shop (later folded back into the main store) and getting a little better about stocking obscure stuff. But their monopoly ended around 1996 when Tower Records opened a store three blocks away, the largest music shop which East Lansing had ever seen. Where House did a valiant job of trying to compete against Tower: they consistently undercut Tower's price by a buck and they bulked up the classical and world music sections. And they stocked & promoted alt.country music in conjunction with the popular "Progressive Torch & Twang" show on MSU's student radio station. I made an effort to support them by shopping there first for popular items which it was likely they would carry; I was fond of their Tuesday $2 discount sale. Now it will be Tower which has the monopoly on new CD sales in East Lansing.
I loved progressive torch and twang so much that a friend of mine used to record it for me on a regular basis.
I quite liked the Michigan Wherehouse Records in Ann Arbor, though that may have been largely because they had at least one buyer whose tastes overlapped significantly with mine. Tower's post-Wherehouse behavior in Ann Arbor was not encouraging. Record buyers in East Lansing should prepare themselves for sticker shock.
I could tell when Tower moved in to East Lansing, in its strategy, that it was trying to run all the other companies out of business by undercutting them, and then was planning to up the prices once it had a monopoly. I was also of the impression that we had laws in this country about that sort of thing, but Reno's busy with M$ and Elian.
When did Tower undercut anyone on price in East Lansing? (Or Ann Arbor.) I never saw it. Tower is at $17.99 for most discs, maybe $16.99 in more obscure titles. Where House was almost always a dollar cheaper.
Tower was never a good place to shop for discs unless they were on sale or you had one of their $3.00 coupons, but it seemed to me that the Ann Arbor Tower's prices got even worse and the frequency of their "good" sales decreased once their competition fell apart. I could easily be wrong, or the timing could be completely coincidental..
Tower undercut in East Lansing for a good year or so after it opened in E Lansing. Price differences between the Tower in E Lansing and the Tower in A2 for the same disc were around $2-3.
In the latest high-profile headline in the music industry, the FTC has apparently reached a settlement with the Big 5 record conglomerates regarding allegedly anti-competitive advertising practices. The settlement forbids the now common practice of subsidizing retailers' advertising costs in exchange for an agreement that retailers will not advertise reduced prices on most discs. According to reports, the expected result of the settlement is increased competition among music retailers and reduced music costs, by as much as $1/disc or more.
What few reports have covered is that the resulting reductions in price are expected to put further downward pressure on the profitability of small independent CD shops. But most of them are probably doomed anyway.
A two-page letter from owner Jim Leonard announces cutbacks and reorganization in the SKR empire; this is described as a "partial liquidation." This letter is posted in the Liberty Street storefronts. The former SKR Classical storefront will become "Uptown Music," and will incorporate jazz and world music as well as classical. Half of today's SKR store, the side which had the jazz cds, will become "Downtown Music" with the rock, pop, blues, and everything else. My reading of the message is that the "SKR" name is going to be discarded, but I'm not sure about that. The original Schoolkids storefront is going to be let go; right now it is a clearance outlet for unwanted stock marked down 45%. The letter also names the five (of eleven) staffers who are going to be laid off. It mentions that the owners of the "Dubplate Pressure" store are going to revive that operation in Ypsilanti. Jim Leonard seems to be complaining that (1) his stores should be seen as the true heir to Schoolkids, since they kept almost all of the old wonderful Schoolkids staff; (2) if customers don't shop at his locally owned store, it will go away and everyone will have to shop at Borders. My rude comments later...
I always get creeped out when I go in there...it has looked "under construction" since it changed from Schoolkids to SKR, and they keep moving the genres around so I can't find anything the next time I go in. Not a welcoming environment at all.
Katie I agree. But even when it *was* under construction, it was still more inviting than it is now.
Yeah, I used to spend hours in Schoolkids. Now, I cant stay in that place for 5 minutes.
Hey Ken, was Mike Perrini on that list of people getting laid off?
Carla: I don't know, I did not note down all the staff names. Katie in resp:187 :: Jim Leonard had some rather exotic plans for store decor which were never brought to fulfillment. One side of the store was supposed to be done up in "Neuromancer"-style high-tech garishness, and the other side was supposed to be done up as a tropical jungle. I do not know how far along they may have gotten before realizing the money wasn't there to support these dreams; I was under the vague impression that they had gotten the construction work underway. I went to check the SKR stores out this morning. I fished 8 discs out of the clearance center, mostly pretty good stuff: Den Fule, John Renbourn & Doris Hederson, Dave Schramm, Original Harmony Creek Dippers, Planxty, Mary McCaslin, Sonya Hunter, and Odetta. It's sad if this is the stuff they can't sell. I ran out of time and brainpower to make sense of the piles of classical discs which were 45% off. It did seem like the classical bins were dominated by lesser known performers and composers. Besides the cds at the "Clearance Outlet," there are more closeouts at SKR Classical. In the SKR Pop-Rock/Downtown Music store, there was a big 99 cent bin with some promising items in it. There were also a lot of used discs. I think the store may be going for a close to 50% new/used mix. Over at SKR Classical/Uptown Music, I found that well over 1/2 of the opera stock has been removed. Maybe they're in a box just being moved from one spot to another. There are more discs marked down 45% at SKR Classical. It looks to me like the folk and classical genres are making up the bulk of the stock being liquidated -- possibly 1/3 to 1/2 of SKR's stock in those fields is being swept out. The rock CD stock is being given a haircut, and very little jazz is being liquidated. It does have the feel of a going out of business sale.
(Which Mary McCaslin album?) Mary is playing at Green Wood in Oct.
I got Mary McCaslin's "Old Friends" out of the bargain bin. I think there were other McCaslin CDs in there, but I can't be sure.
Back to the Minimum Advertised Price policy, resp:184, resp:185 ::
this is from http://www.billboard.com/daily/2000/0518_08.asp,
from a tail end of the story:
"Merchants privately say that the elimination of MAP
rekindles fears that price wars will break out and return
music retail to the unprofitability it suffered from 1994-1996,
before strong MAP policies were adopted and enforced.
"During those price wars, electronics retailers like Best Buy
and Circuit City were selling music at a loss, in an effort
to increase customer traffic for higher-priced electronics
goods. The labels argued that MAP policies would make it
easier for small retailers to compete with the giants, thus
increasing consumer choices."
Leslie and I took another trip to the SKR Clearance Outlet today, since we were going downtown for dinner anyway. There's a new, more alarming note from Jim Leonard in the window. The discount has been ratcheted up from 45% to 50%. "The situation is critical," says the note, and if they don't sell enough clearance CDs the stores could close in a couple of weeks. So we did our part. :) I got three CDs which I'd passed over on the Thursday trip, and it amazed me that they were all still there, after being on sale at half price for three days; especially the import reissue of the Kinks' LOLA VS.POWERMAN album. And with Leslie there to answer questions I pillaged the classical section and Leslie picked up a bunch of classical vocal discs. It was 8 pm Saturday night, and there was only one other customer in our side of the store. It wasn't that no one was downtown: Borders was pretty crowded.
htat's skr classical across from borders downtown, right? i may go check it out tomorrow, if i can convince myself to drive downtown.
Like most Kinks albums, "Lola Vs. Powerman and the Money-go-round" is fantastically uneven, but it's well worth having if solely for my favorite Kinks song, "Apeman"..
It is quite a bummer to go in there. (We went on Monday night, and I picked up a Silly Wizard Greatest Hits CD, Tannas, an Irish sea shanty record, and an old Connie Dover -- all ones that I had been mildly interested in obtaining, but nothing I would have bought normally.)
I did not know until tonight that the "SKR Downtown" store was in the former Annex storefront. The two westernmost SKR storefronts, the original Schoolkids space and the early '90s expansion, have been vacated. I have said for a long time that Ann Arbor has been overbuilt for CD retailing. But I was not expecting the jolt I got tonight from the "bummed" item in the Agora conference: ---------- #977 of 984: by Yay the Happy Whale (otaking) on Sat, Jun 17, 2000 (20:12): IBB Tower Records is closing at 4PM on Sunday, June 25. #978 of 984: by Bruin the Bare Bear (bruin) on Sat, Jun 17, 2000 (20:52): You don't mean the Tower Records on South University in Ann Arbor, do you? #979 of 984: by Yay the Happy Whale (otaking) on Sat, Jun 17, 2000 (21:35): Yes, unfortunately I do. They claim to be closing temporarily, to make way for UM offices, but one of the staff members said that was a false hope. They're having a clearance sale. Anywhere from $2-4 off all CDs. 30% off all books. 20-30% all DVDs and videos. All sale prives are off the regular prices, not, the existing sale prices. Guess it's another victim of online sales.
Wow.. I wouldn't have called that one, although it retrospect it doesn't surprise me. It always seemed like there were not a lot of people wandering around in there relative to the amount of floor space they were taking up in what has to be a more expensive location than places like Best Buy, etc..
As was pointed out in Agora: the demolition of the Forest St. parking ramp has to have hurt Tower badly; there is now essentially no public parking near their store before 6 pm. But I had always thought the chain was willing to ride this period out. Still, I had detected the standard sign of retail distress in a CD shop: the stock was collapsing. In particular, the pop/rock rack space had been cut back to make more room for geegaws. I'm still in shock. I have never seen this many CD retail failures, this fast. I know this city's been overbuilt for CD retailing for at least five years; but this is supposed to be a good economy. And I certainly never expected to end up with Borders as the leading CD retailer in town, in terms of selection. As I wrote in Agora: for maybe 25 years, beginning with the opening of Schoolkids, Ann Arbor was (arguably) the best place to shop for LPs & CDs between Toronto and the west coast. Friends who were visiting SE Michigan for science fiction conventions would make pilgrimages to the Liberty St./State St./South U. area. But with the closing of Tower, it's over. Ann Arbor will no longer have a significantly better CD shopping scene than most towns with a Borders and a decent used store.
Heh. If you want to read what Grexers thought of the *opening* of the Ann Arbor Tower, almost nine years ago, it's in the oldmusic conference, item 17. (item:oldmusic,17 and eventually that link will become item:music1,17)
Somebody alert the RIAA! This *must* be Napster's fault.. :-p
re #202: I was kind of surprised to see how consistent my Ann Arbor record store opinions were over the years.. And I was mortified by the section where several of us were discussing the anticipated release of an Enya album -- can that be expunged? If nothing else, it was worth reading for the nostalgic flashback I got when I came across the responses about the demise of the longbox..
#203: You don't think there's the slightest bit of a coincidence that indie college-city-based CD outlets are going out of business at the same rate that Napster is spreading? You're more naive, or in deeper denial, than I thought.
What about the study that showed a decline in such sales before Napster was created?
don't confuse the issue with facts and statistics, Cyklone. this is an emotional issue.
I'll write more about my pillaging of Tower tomorrow. There's still a lot of stuff worth digging through, since the sale is just a standard Tower storewide sale; Tower doesn't have to liquidate the stock, since they can just ship it to another store. Even after knocking $4 off Tower's inflated prices, there were folk and world music items which would be cheaper at Elderly Instruments. And the new Neil Young album had a "base price" sticker of $19.99, though they were selling it for a few dollars cheaper than that.
Yeah, the sale at Towers isn't very impressive. That's why I only bought a couple of things there. Neither was music-related, so I won't talk about them here.
i got two cds at wazoo today
wazoo is a great place.
News item from www.wired.com, reprinted widely so I won't bother with the URL: 28 states are suing the major record labels seeking damages over the now-discontinued Minimum Advertised Price scheme, which the FTC found to be an illegal price-fixing conspiracy. The FTC was content to slap the labels' wrists and get a consent decree, but the state A.G.s want damage checks that they can wave in front of voters. "The lawsuit alleges that traditional retailers pressured the record companies to set minimum retail floor prices after a price war brought by discount retailers dropped the average price of CDs from $15 to $10." $10 is below wholesale; the discount retailers, as I've discussed elsewhere, were (intentionally or not) engaged in predatory pricing by selling CDs below cost. The goal of the discount stores was to use CDs as loss leaders and make it up on electronics sales.
I can't remember the last time the "average price of CDs" was less than $10. When exactly is this supposed to have occurred?
Mike, see resp:194 in this item.
Schoolkids-in-Exile continues to grow on me. This weekend, Steve Bergman was chatting about how the little basement store is the same size as the Schoolkids he opened in 1976. The folk music section continues to grow a bit, and I also found some goodies in the African music section. I suspect the selection continues to bear Bergman's personal stamp, so how much you will enjoy it will depend on how congruent your tastes are with his.
The only way I can conceive of "the average price of CDs" having been under $10 during the 1994-1996 period is if Best Buy, et al, sold enough of those $5.99 cut-outs at the front of the store to counter-balance the entire rest of the industry. $12.99 was a pretty average price for a retail CD in those years, at least by my recollection.
I've groused occasionally in the past about the lack of good CD shopping opportunities in Chicago. On last weekend's trip I found the new (?) Virgin Megastore on the "Magnificent Mile," somewhat south of the Water Tower. It's a classic big-city CD shop, and I found all sorts of goodies there, including discs by Lo'Jo and the Terem Quartet which I thought would have to be ordered from Europe. I was mostly poking through the World Music section and it was pretty decently stocked. The staff was chatty and knowledgable, and I ended up buying three of the discs playing in different parts of the story: Celia Cruz, the new Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington reissue, and a collection of piano studies based on Chopin. I really enjoyed lolling around in the classical section since classical CD shopping in Ann Arbor has taken such a hit this year.
Did you happen to go see Celia Cruz when some U group brought her to Hill Auditorium two years ago? It was a really fun show..
Yeah, I love that store. (I'm not sure how new it is, but it's been around at least since the beginning of last year). I was surprised to see that it's got the largest and best-stocked classical section of any store I've been in, and the listening stations mostly had <gasp> music I enjoyed hearing. As far as gigantor CD shops go, it seems to be pretty well-rounded -- I heard Macy Gray and Yat-Kha both for the first time there. From what I can tell, most of the good CD shopping in Chicago is well-hidden and not downtown -- closer to Wazoo than to Schoolkids' in terms of noticeability. Alas, since I've been here, I've done most of my shopping when I'm back in Ann Arbor, so I can't give much by way of reccomendation, other than that Earwax Cafe is a way fun place.
Mike slipped in. (Exciting stuff, no?)
Continuing on from resp:212, I condense a report from today's http://salon.com, "What The Hell's Going On In The Music Biz?" With the RIAA's Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy shot down in flames by the FTC and state Attorney Generals, Best Buy decided to offer the new Limp Bizkit CD as a loss leader. Best Buy sold 500,000 of this disc at $9.99, losing two dollars per disc; this was half of the one million Limp Bizkit units sold nationwide. Quoting from Salon: "MAP was originally put into effect to stop precisely what Best Buy is doing. Will Best Buy's move provoke an across-the-board price war? Consumers hope so. Mom and pop retailers, which can't compete at those prices, hope not. If stores like Best Buy and the Good Guys start low-balling prices again, it could finish off an independent record-retail industry that already took a mighty hit in the pre-MAP years." Of course, most of Ann Arbor's independent record-retail industry has already been finished off. Perhaps the future of the CD business is entirely as a loss-leader for consumer electronics.
from a news story on http://www.redherring.com about Tower Records' dot-com operation: It's a good thing Tower's online operations are doing well. The company's traditional business is struggling. Despite total sales of $1.03 billion last year, the company's net loss was $8.8 million. The advent of competition, such as Borders, Amazon.com and CDNow, is widely seen to be eating into Tower's sales.
I guess that's what happens when you only charge $17.99 for CDs -- there's just no profit margin..
OK, I'm pissed as hell so I'm going to vent about it here. After I missed out on getting the Peter Gabriel album OVO last night at Borders, I saw copies in the window at SKR Downtown. This was way after SKR's closing time, so today I figured I'd make a special trip downtown, pay for parking, be a supportive customer of the local business. And when I got there, I found out that SKR had priced this disc at $32.99. I complained about the price to the young woman at the counter. "It's an import," she shrugged. At that point I went ballistic and said some rather intemperate things, and stormed out of the store. Tower East Lansing, when they have stocked OVO, have had it around $25. Amazon.com prices it at $22.49. Amazon.co.uk lists it for 12 UK pounds, which right now is less than $18 in US funds. Borders.com lists it at $17.46. If SKR had been competitive with Tower, I would have cheerfully paid the $25 and I'd be playing the CD now. Instead, I'm now swearing that this is the last time I make a special trip to try to get something from SKR uptown or downtown. I'd write to the owner and tell him that he's pissed off a customer, but I can't find an e-mail address for the SKR operation and the web site claims to be "under construction."
Yeah, I was looking for the GBS Canadian stuff, and they were telling me $32. I ended up getting it for (at most) $20 for one, and $18 for the other two. That was the last time I was in that store.
Megan, was that SKR on Liberty, or Schoolkids-in-the-Basement on State St?
(Ah, I looked at the e-mail I sent you in April, when Schoolkids- in-the-Basement had the Canadian GBS stuff at $18.)
I got the GBS stuff at Basement, except for one that they didn't have, but I got recently at Media Play! (They carry all of the GBS Canadian...I was a little surprised...) The SKR on Liberty was the one that said they couldorder them for $32.
It's scary when MediaPlay has a better selection than SKR. FYI, if you're interested in Canadian bands, Festival Distribution has a nifty catalog AND charges Canadian dollars.... which means that you can get things very inexpensively.
How does one find their catalog?
I have a copy, and I got on their mailing list via the Internet.
Re Ken's unfortunate retail experience in 224: I remember being amazed to see American import rock CDs at Tower in Piccadilly Square in London priced at 20 pounds - and this at a time when that would be rather more than US$30 (and web retailing did not exist). I began to regret that I hadn't, like Westerners taking blue jeans to the old East Bloc, brought along a box of these CDs from home and sold them on the street corner. I could have given a massive discount and still have made a killing. (Yes, I know this would have been illegal. But the amazing thing is what isn't illegal.)
I bought a copy of Peter Gabriel's OVO for $22.99 from Tower East Lansing. Ten dollars cheaper than SKR. I really need to write the SKR owner a letter. Leslie and I drove out to Harmony House's classical store in Royal Oak over the weekend. Leslie has been needing to do some browsing for Tchaikovsky song discs -- and Szymanoski song discs, if any such exist. The web retailers are poor at this sort of browsing, if you don't have the title of a specific song -- and if your transliteration of a song title from Russian doesn't match their transliteration. Trying to browse through everything that turns up on a search for "Tchaikovsky" on a web store is painful. So in the bins Leslie found a couple of Tchaikovsky song CDs, and we found a bunch of other classical items, like a highlights disc from Verdi's ATTILA (for $5!) and a closeout on a set of Chopin polonaises, and a new disc of selections from obscure Donizetti operas. It's the sort of shopping experience you can't have in Ann Arbor any more, now that the best classical music section is the one at Borders. I sure hope this store manages to last. (Aside for David: Harmony House is a venerable Detroit-area music chain. Their regular shops are just mall stores, nothing special, but a few years ago when they moved to a new store in Royal Oak, they turned their old Royal Oak space into a very good classical specialist store.)
Ken - if this isn't too obvious, what you need is to consult a copy of the Schwann Opus catalog. There's nothing like a print catalog for certain types of browsing. I buy a new one every couple of years. I don't have it here at home, so I can't look up Szymanowski for you right now, but under each composer, general song recitals are listed under "Songs" with a list of the songs included (a feature Schwann didn't used to have), while song cycles assembled by the composer are under title.
Thanks for the suggestion, David! We hadn't thought of it. Is the Schwann stuff still being published on paper? I'd thought I'd read they were moving online -- but even in an online format they might offer what Leslie needs in detailed classical browsing.
Ken - Schwann is not online (though they have an informational web page). The classical catalog, which is now called "Schwann Opus", is a 1000-page behemoth released quarterly, a far cry from the smaller and less informative monthly of yore. It gives album titles (e.g. "Live at Carnegie Hall"), detailed lists of contents, (frequently) dates of recording, etc etc. I have my catalog to hand now, so I can tell you that there's one Szymanowski song collection in the Spring '00 issue. The singer(s) isn't listed, which is unusual, but the album is titled "Songs with Orchestra"; it includes "Love Songs of Hafiz", "Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin", "Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess", "Roxana's Song", and "Songas after Kasprowicz", and it's Naxos 8553688. There's also a recording of "Muezzin" paired with Felicien David's "Le Desert", sung by G. Ottenthal (soprano), on Capriccio 10379.
Wow. Weird stuff at Borders last night! I went in to the music section at the downtown Ann Arbor Borders just to poke around, not really planning on buying anything. But... wow. Several copies of Bedlam Born (Steeleye Span's newest) at *gulp* $13.99. Two copies of John Tams' Unity at ditto. Several copies of Gabriel's OVO (23.99). Maddy Prior's Ravenchild. ... Quite a lot of things that I had not thought would be available Stateside, actually. So I got Bedlam Born.
Heh. If I had known Park Records was going to end their policy of putting CDs into the US market about one year after their release in Britain, I wouldn't have ordered BEDLAM BORN as an import. Sounds like Borders got a large shipment from the UK, I will have to find time to go paw over it.
Mickey, would you write something for us about half.com?
Sure, Ken --- I'd love to do so. <grin> I found out about half.com when I was on vacation, back in September. I thought I'd take a look at their selection, and IIRC, I didn't find much that interested me at first. The site did offer a wish list function, and I took advantage of that and promptly forgot all about it. Imagine my surprise, when I arrived home from vacation, I found a notification that a used copy of "Rhodes I" by Happy Rhodes had become available for purchase. The total with shipping was just a smidge over $9 --- and better yet, was described as being in Like new condition, still-sealed. I was ecstatic, having seen the same disc in worse condition sell for upwards of $70 over on ebay.com. It was very simple to purchase with a credit card. Unlike it's sister website, half.com handles all the purchasing details, and it's not necessary for the buyer and seller to contact one another. So far, the listings are for CDs, books, DVDs/movies, and console-type games. I have been selling quite a few items, also. It's a much less painful process than eBay, for your average run-of-the-mill product. I still reserve rarities for eBay, because the ROI tends to be higher. Check it out, if you're in the mood for a good browse through a used CD/bookstore, but don't want to leave your computer. Caveat emptor! Check the descriptions carefully, as well as the rating system that sellers are *required* to honour. Also, check the seller's feedback rating and watch for things like over-rating, slow shipping (seller's should ship w/in 24hrs of confirmation), or dead-beat sellers.
Ooooh, a wish list function. I've been thinking obsessively about Jungr & Parker's album CANADA, out of print, alas....
I started item:music,291 to discuss the winding-up of the SKR stores on Liberty St., so it could be linked to other conferences. I'll probably try to keep other discussion about music retail here.
Another CD shop obituary... I hopped over to Windsor today and found that Dr. Disc will be closing on February 11. The sign in the window invited customers to stop in and pay their respects; viewing hours end at 6 pm. My visit was cut drastically short; I had planned on the store having its usual late evening hours. Dr. Disc was part of a southern Ontario chain of indie-oriented stores, and I didn't ask if the whole chain was going out of business, or just the Windsor store. I'd only been there a few times over the years; their folk stocks were always disappointing, but they did carry a lot of Canadian rock bands which I might have heard on the CBC-FM late night shows. Today, the stock has already been well picked over -- the store was about half empty -- and the sale discounts weren't too deep, so I wouldn't recommend a trip there for anything except sentimental reasons. Perhaps the relatively new (?) HMV store in the Devonshire Mall pushed Dr. Disc over the edge; the HMV store had a lot of goodies in it.
((( Due to a disk space crunch in the /bbs partition, cfadm has moved
late 1990s Agoras to a different partition. For reasons I don't
fully understand, this may eventually cause problems with items
linked from those Agoras when they are moved back to /bbs at some
future date.
This item is linked from a 1998 Agora. It seemed safest just
to cut off discussion here and start a new item on the topic.
I don't think there are any other active music conference items
with similar links; let me know if you think I missed any. )))
Stuff's been moved back - this item should be safe to discuss in again. (Doesn't look like anything got lost; let me know if you notice anything.)
Looks fine. But current discussion on music retail issues has moved on to item:music,293 and it might as well continue there.
You have several choices: