Record Store Day

? I love downloading music, make no bones about it. I can get my hands on all kinds of music from all over the place. I can hear stuff commercial radio won’t play and that it is hard to find. I have a huge library of downloaded music. But there is another place to find unusual and hard to find music, the independent record store. And discovering music in the local record store is so much more fun than discovering it online, even for a geek like me. The sensory experience of browsing, exploring, touching what you are thinking of buying cannot be beat. Plus the record store can be a social experience. You can talk to the shoppkeeper and the other patrons about the music. You can’t do that online, even in this age of web 2.0 and social software..

But the independent record store is at risk, its survival threatened by the online music store and mass merchandisers. How do independent record stores match the buying power and merchadising budgets of Wal Mart, Amazon, Borders, or Barnes and Noble? An indepenent record store can stock what it wants to stock, promote what it wants to promote, hold the events it wants to hold, arrange the store the ways it chooses, and pursue the policies it deems most appropriate. Do you want to have to always shop for music in places where these choices are determined, at least in part, by corporate headquarters many states away? Saturday April 19 is Record Store Day, a day to celebrate the independent record store. A lot of stores are holding special events. Find out what’s going on near you. ]]>