Music World Closing

It just hit me this morning that the music world (ha, I just caught my own pun) that we live in is changing drastically.

Music World across Canada has filed for bankruptcy and will be closing its stores unless someone swoops in and saves them.

What does this mean to all of us? Well, Sam The Record Man shut its doors sometime in the past year. While I never frequented Sam The Record Man (they didn’t have many stores in Ottawa and when they did, they just didn’t have the prices that Music World or HMV do), it had quite the following as my cousin Troy can attest to as he mentioned how he used to find old Metallica imports in the shop down on Younge Street.

Back to Music World, I am pretty bummed that this store is closing shop. I usually hit up Music World in the mall over HMV because they tended to have better prices on their new releases. I also like checking both stores all the time to compare. It was my thing. Now, all I’ll have to go to is HMV. While I enjoy HMV’s crazy combo item sales (like BUY TWO FOR $20!), I felt Music World had more of the music fans working in it. You could talk about an album with the employees and see what they thought.

Where does this put the world of music stores? It’s a strange world we live in where there are reports of CD sales actually increasing due to downloading of music, but in the end, I guess it’s still not enough to help the record shops stay open?

Now we’ll have HMV in the malls and that’s about it. Other alternatives are electronics stores like Best Buy and Future Shop which aren’t that bad when it comes to new releases and they are actually priced great. But what about smaller communities that can’t afford a Best Buy in town? I feel bad for the teens of Kapuskasing who are growing up with downloading because all they have is the craptacular music section at Wal-Mart…the store which bans certain albums from hitting their shelves. Ugh. I always cringe when I go home and peruse their music section. Half of it consists of those 20th Century Greatest Hits packages!

What’s the future in music retail? Well, if HMV eventually caves, I think you’ll see the resurgence of local record shops which will specialize in albums. Sure, it will be more expensive (ack!), but maybe it’s worth it for the personal experience you will get when entering the local music shop. I always enjoyed going to AVE (I think that stood for Audio-Visual Entertainment) in the Model City Mall. The people working there always had some good thoughts on what I was purchasing. I also remember someone telling me how CD singles would be gone within the year. Oh, how wrong you were…how wrong you were.

Side-note Rant – Let’s talk about the Future Shop in Orleans. Newly opened up, this place sucks. I’ve been there twice on ‘new release day’ but they don’t have all their stock out! I had to wait 30 minutes for them to fish out a Pearl Jam DVD that had just come out. I went there last week to pick up the new Beatles Help film and it was nowhere to be found! Argh. Mike also had a hard time when going to purchase an external hard drive which was in the flyer. When the helper (can he really be called that?) said there were none there, we made him look in the database to find out there were 17 in the store. Then when he took off looking for them, we saw him chatting it up with his buddies for 10 minutes! What the heck?

Future Shop in Orleans – shame on you. If you have commercials indicating that customers run to your doors on new release day, the least you can do is have the stock on the shelves and not in the stock room.

Back to the original thought of this posting – I am sorry to see Music World leave. Although I must admit their cataloging system was like a code you needed a decoder ring to break.