Last night I went to our local Virgin Megastore (Sunset and Laurel) and was saddened to see it empty. I walked into the book store––shelves of great looking books all looking at me saying BUY ME! BUY ME! And I was the only one there. And I didn’t buy anything. I sneaked out feeling guilty that I, along with a lot of other people, are not buying as much from retail stores. Seeing these corporate behemoths like Tower and Virgin and Blockbusters dizzily stagger, trying to adjust to a new reality, I feel sad to see an era pass. An era where the tactile nature of buying things seems less important than just content. But ah, the pendulum will swing back, and manually flipping through CDs or DVDs or books will once again be popular.
Most of the music I listen to is now on one of my hard drives. The wall of CDs is less necessary. All of my synthesizers are now inside my computer. The wall of rack-mount synthesizers is no longer necessary. I still have a huge wall of LPs that will just stay there. I will listen to them occasionally, otherwise they give tremendous warmth to my office. And that will be my memory fragment of Virgin Megastore or Tower Records when they shut their doors.
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I had the same experience here in Boston about 2 weeks ago… Took a stroll through the Virgin Megastore on Newbury Street, which SHOULD have been packed on a Saturday afternoon, and the place was a graveyard. I felt sad, but my own behavior as a consumer (buying through Amazon and iTunes store) helped bring this about. I don’t think my kids would even know what to do if you gave them a gift certificate to a Virgin Megastore. They only want iTunes cards…
Andy
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