Record stores: life, death, rebirth?
Decider talks shop with the director of I Need That Record!
Brendan Toller
The late, great Vinyl Mania
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It’s no secret that the music industry has been suffering financially for quite a while now, starting long before the entire economy went up in flames. Record stores have been going belly-up at a feverish pace, with Tower and Virgin crossed off the list and 3,000 independent record shops shut down during the past decade. Brendan Toller focuses on these stores in I Need That Record! The Death (Or Possible Survival) Of The Independent Record Store, his school-project-cum-documentary that examines why the little guys are becoming endangered species. With Record Store Day happening on Saturday, April 18, Decider got on the phone with the 22-year-old Toller—who lives in western Massachusetts—to talk about his film, record shopping, and the importance of community spaces.
Decider: You talk about big-box stores, the Telecommunications Act Of 1996, and the Internet playing roles in the closure of independent record stores, but your main culprits in the film are clearly greedy major labels and their bad business practices. Are they more to blame than downloading?
Brendan Toller: Certainly the Internet has made it much easier to get music. As I say in the film, it’s very hard to beat “free,” so that’s also an incentive. And certainly in this economy—I even know for myself, working part-time, I can barely afford to go record shopping anymore. But yeah, I do still kind of think it was major labels. In the early ’90s, CD singles were really, really big. And then they just totally did away with that in the mid-’90s to cash out on album sales. It’s all these forces I feel forced people to go to the Internet, because that was the only way to sidestep all this bullshit. Like MTV not playing any music videos; radio becoming totally repetitive and corporatized. I think that this whole push of corporatization and mediocrity has forced people to seek different avenues to discover music. And a lot of record stores couldn’t see that shift. They still thought that they could sell the Britney Spears record or Jessica Simpson and still make money.
D: Would the same number of record stores have gone out of business without the Internet?
BT: The Internet, for indie stores, is a double-edged sword. It informs a lot of people about music they would have never heard before, but it also allows people to get stuff for free. It was reported [by BigChampagne] that the ratio of files being downloaded illegally to what was being sold in the music industry was something like 12 to 1. That’s incredible and ridiculous. So if the Internet had not existed, would indie stores still be hurting? Yeah, I think certainly. The major labels since the ’80s have just made this total push toward selling an artist that they know will sell this amount hugely one day, and not artists that will sell over the long term.
Thurston Moore remembers the old daysBrendan Toller
Thurston Moore remembers the old daysBrendan TollerD: But then you have someone like Glenn Branca, who at the beginning of the film gets very nostalgic about the old days of record stores, but later admits that now he buys his music and books online to save money.
BT: I totally agree with Glenn Branca’s assessment of it—there’s many times where I don’t want to deal with going to a store, wasting the gas to get there to be told they don’t have it. And it’s certainly easier to order online, and, in most cases, the prices are actually cheaper. So I think indie stores really need to focus on, why do people want to come to your store versus going on the Internet? Their focus is changing—it used to be that they just sold records, and I think it’s got to become more than that. It’s got to become a community space.
D: A lot of people talk about the loss of a community space when a record store goes out of business, but isn’t there something inherently flawed in trying to use a retail outlet as a community space?
BT: Well, besides businesses, what do you see as places—?
D: Church is an example.
BT: But church relies on, like, passing the hat.
D: Sure, but during a bad economy, you don’t hear about churches going out of business. And at the end of the film, Malcolm Tent from Trash American Style says that one of the things he misses most is the fellowship, which is a word that’s often associated with church.
BT: Yeah, and certainly the guys from Culture Clash say that, too, that it’s like giving communion when they sell a record to somebody in the store. So what was the—?
D: The inherent flaw in using a retail space as a community space.
BT: Oh yeah, absolutely. But there’s just not that many government-funded or nonprofit community spaces in a lot of towns. Thankfully, where I live in Easthampton, two blocks down the road is an all-volunteer independent art and music space. Sonic Youth’s played there, Fugazi’s played there over the years, and it’s a really awesome place to go no matter who’s playing. They have coffee and stuff, and you can hang out, and there’s wall space for artwork. It really brings people from the local and the national level together. And that’s a really awesome model for a community space. So, it is definitely a flaw that these business spaces serve as community spaces, but that’s what they are, and that’s part of their value, and that’s part of the reason why people should support them and why they do need to make money.
D: It’s just depressing to see these people with so much passion for music saying that they don’t have anywhere to go now. Maybe it’s time for people to think of alternative ways of getting people together.
BT: Maybe a new space is essential to the next evolution of things. I don’t know. But when you think of a music place, you usually think of either live music or a place that sells CDs and records. I think it can be a hybrid of those. People should start thinking differently what a record store is. As I keep saying, it’s definitely a community space—well, maybe merge it with some other kind of space that engenders hanging out. What if you did a Laundromat record store? Or a bar record store? You definitely need to have some added value to get people in there.
D: Record Store Day is coming up. Are you taking part in any events?
BT: My issue with them is that they don’t really like the title of my film. I’ve been in touch with them, and they almost have refused to look at my film, and I don’t really know why. It’s borderline silly. But they don’t like the word “death” in the title, even though I try to say that the title is a contradiction, and, “Come on guys, just take a look at it, I’m on your side.”
D: At the end of the film you say, “Don’t give up.” Is that your way of saying that you’re hopeful about the future of record stores?
BT: Yeah. My point of making this movie was certainly not to say that record stores are dead, but to make people aware that they will be gone if you don’t start thinking of ways to keep them in the community and ways to keep them relevant.
