
Japan has more old-fashioned music stores than anywhere else - golfstrom
http://qz.com/711490/why-japan-has-more-music-stores-than-the-rest-of-the-world/
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2bitencryption
When I visited Japan for the first time a few months ago, I wandered upon a
record shop that had the largest selection of Beatles records (both re-
releases and originals from the 60's) I've ever seen. And the speakers in the
store played only Beatles song covers by all types of different groups
(country, punk, new-age, you name it).

As a Beatles junkie, it was so cool. And a very grounding moment for someone
still experiencing a bit of culture shock, to share something in common with
this culture.

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sixQuarks
I went to a very large music store in a heavily trafficked area of Portland
recently and realized how useless this type of store has become. Unlike a
bookstore, it's not fun to "browse" music physically, we have become spoiled
by services such as spotify.

Here is what it looked like inside, nearly empty of shoppers:
[http://i.imgur.com/kcrYKG6.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/kcrYKG6.jpg)

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DanBC
A good music store has excellent curation, which is still not a solved problem
for online stores. (IMDB's "People who liked this also liked..." has got much
worse over time.)

There's also a bunch of sub-culture signalling, which I accept is off-putting
to many people. But the fact that at least two reasonably good films were set
in record stores means something.

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cholantesh
>A good music store has excellent curation, which is still not a solved
problem for online stores

I'm not sure it's truly a solved problem for brick and mortar, either. For a
big box, curation is generally done at the corporate level, and their staff
are not much more knowledgeable than the average patron.

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donretag
Tower Records spun off their Japan division and it is still going strong. Back
at home, they declared bankruptcy closed all their US stores

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bitwize
I witnessed Tower Records asplode in 2007 in graphic detail when a very large
and very well-stocked Tower shop jn Portland, OR was forced to sell off every
scrap of inventory (allowing me to stock up on Danger Mouse (the cartoon, not
the DJ) DVDs, among other things).

Imagine my surprise when I landed in Osaka in 2011 and saw Tower Records still
very much a thing there.

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davidgerard
Dangerous Minds has a somewhat ranty article going into precisely how the
majors destroyed the record business in the late 1990s:

[http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_rise_and_fall_of_towe...](http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_rise_and_fall_of_tower_records_and_how_the_music_industry_screwed_the_p)

That said, they had some idea what they were doing: they cut the least
profitable 25% of their artists and SKUs, dropping unit sales by 4.1%, then
blamed "piracy":

[http://web.archive.org/web/20030113094231/http://www.azoz.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030113094231/http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html)

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dba7dba
I remember reading article about Japan and fax machines. A lot of lunch
takeout places still have a very high fax traffic because they accept orders
via fax.

