Sign Of The Times ?

About eighteen months or so ago I appeared (by phone I add) on the Ian Collins show on TalkSport. The subject for the first hour of his programme was downloading music and I found myself talking for longer than I had intended. My own inflated ego would claim that this is because I can string more than two sentences together without sounding pissed or on drugs at half past eleven at night, I think the truth was that Ian and myself had both found kindred spirits on a night when few people seemed to have much to say. Anyhoo, during our ten to fifteen minute conversation that subject of record shops came up and I pointed out that there wasn't a record shop where I lived and that the nearest independent record shop was, and still is, some twenty two miles away - Ian Collins to his credit did one of those 'What!' replies that shock jocks love to throw into the mix from time to time and our conversation ran it's natural course.

Today we, the family and I, visited Poole, it's half term and Poole is one of those places that seems to exist in a time vacuum in many respects - the old town and High Street remains resolutely stuck in the sixties (apart from the fact that it is pedestrianised), whilst the area around the Quay is a mixture of millionaires row and seaside tat. It was market day today which meant that the tatometer was working in overdrive, I know times are hard but there are somethings on sale out there that defy logic, but perhaps I'm being hard on the vendor and his/her prospective customer. What I couldn't help notice however was the lack of CD outlets, Poole lost its last independent music retailer about fifteen years ago but now they just have WH Smith which restricts its choice of CD's to its own Top Twenty and Woolworths which does the same. How do the good people of Poole get to buy a CD outside of the chart if there isn't anywhere in town? WH Smith have been using a similar approach to books for years, they will only sell authors who they believe can guarantee a certain level of sales, but to adopt or adapt this methodology to the music industry seems crazy. There is now only one shop, and that is part of a national chain, that sells CD's as they are released, between Poole and Southampton - that's a distance of close to 40 miles, if you factor in the small Dorset and Hampshire towns that are also without record shops (for want of a better description) there must be about 800 square miles of Southern England that doesn't have access to an independent music store.

This must be due to one factor - the Internet. It is now so easy to browse various online stores, listen to samples, order the CD and wait forty eight hours for delivery that shops are no longer required. It's a sign of the times, it's very sad - the days when you could spend an hour or so thumbing your way through album covers, checking the tracks and admiring the artwork are gone, part of our vanishing collective past. I'm old enough to remember the shops which had listening booths downstairs where you could stand and listen to an entire album before deciding whether or not to buy it.

Our consumption of music has evolved so much over the past two decades from vinyl to CD to mp3 to downloads that we have taken the disappearance of record shops from our High Streets in our stride and replaced them with endless coffee outlets, sandwich shops, charity shops and banks. I've no doubt that if John Lennon and Paul McCartney were to meet today it wouldn't be at a church fete where they were playing in bands it would be at a Subway sandwich shop where they would have both gone to take advantage of a two super subs for the price of one offer.