I may confuse many of you with what I’m about to say.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the internet and the vast and exciting opportunity it has provided content creators, marketers and business people world-wide.  Strategic Blend is built off of these opportunities, so the following rant may seem a bit off-base.

I had the unique experience of “coming of age” during the great transition we’ve just experienced.  I was in middle school in the mid-90s when rock, pop and country music were all at their prime, radio stations actually served the public and music stores were a destination that you SOUGHT OUT when going to the mall.  I remember going on school bus trips and THE savvy kid would always whip out a huge binder of CDs and play “road trip DJ.”  I discovered a lot of music during this time, most of which I still greatly enjoy today.

Because of this, I have a nostalgic pang in my heart for the retail stores of old.  Living in South Dakota, a lot of our small towns had an On Cue or Sam Goody or similar outlet.  Many of our malls had 2 music stores in the same wing.  When you needed something (even cassette singles!) you could find it in these stores.  There was a certain intimacy you felt with the product when purchasing at an actual store.

THEN, on a cool Fall evening in 1999, I discovered Napster.  No longer did I have to make decisions about what I could afford to buy – I could have it ALL!  The next year in college, I was among the many who feasted on this massive buffet every day.  You could load up your Napster queue, go to class and return to a slew of new songs to enjoy.

After Napster shut down, I spent a lot of time in used CD stores, specifically the Great Escape in Nashville, TN.  They had a tremendous selection and I could still consume as much for a very minimal price.  Every weekend I would go down and get 20 CDs for 12-20 bucks.  It was fantastic, and it brought back that intimacy to the product I had been missing.

But then……..iTunes was available for the PC.  No longer did I HAVE to buy new or used CD’s just for one song, when I could get it instantly on iTunes.  Over the course of 2003, I all but abandoned going to an actual retail store and acquired all my music online.

While I was enjoying this new found accessibility, all of the old stores, the On Cues, the Musiclands, the Sam Goodies and Towers and Virgin stores all vanished.  Their spaces now sit empty or occupied by something else un-related to music or entertainment.  Even Borders has completely reduced it’s in-store  music footprint.

And something else unexpected happened….

Because I assembled a massive library of music, the time I spent with a particular song or album shrank.  Where as before I could only afford 2-3 CD’s a month and spent an entire month if not more with that music.  Now I get an album in a day and 2 days later am already on to something else.  I may like that album, but the previous intimacy I experiecned is gone.  I didn’t have to put any thought into whether or not I should buy it – I just got it, consumed it, and moved on to the next.  Like a Viking in the old days, conquering town after town, never really stoping to enjoy the scenery.

This actually makes me sad.  Sad because I have lost that “perception of the product” I used to have, and sad because these once ubiquitous retail outlets are totally gone.  I COMPLETELY understand the economics that drove them away, and I understand all businesses change in time.  However the music business of old, in all it’s facets, was kind of magical in a way.  It was a business that offered many real-world, tangible experiences.  Most of those experiences are gone now, replaced by all online, all digital.  The live show is about the only way left to physically interact with most of the “music experience,” and most live shows are too expensive to attend.

I think many in my generation took this for granted.  We grew up with it, then were easily seduced and energized by new technology…it got the better of us I think.  We didn’t really know what was going on, and now it’s too late.  Granted anyone under the age of 20 will likely not care – they only really know THIS side of the shift.

However there’s a bunch of us, age 25 and older who still long for some semblance of a retail experience again.  Best Buy, Walmart and Target do NOT count – that’s not the same thing.  Certainly there’s an entire demographic of former music fans who don’t participate online and never will, yet still want to be music fans.  How can they enjoy new and old artists when there isn’t that same “magic” that previously existed, luring them in.

We can’t go back in time, and we can’t change the raw power of economics and capitalism.  But these are certainly issues that won’t go away – issues from which any number of new opportunities can and should flow.