This has been coming to mind as I travel through Germany on our vacation this year: I really miss music stores. Just like scrolling through Amazon or Netflix is a pale shadow of browsing through a bookstore or a Blockbuster, the convenience of online music shopping (specifically purchasing, though choosing something to stream fits as well) just doesn’t give the same satisfaction as browsing through the bins of a good music store.
I last visited Germany in the summer of 1991, and was here the summer before that in 1990 as well. Both times, part of what I blew my hard-earned (…ahem…provided by my parents…) money on was music that I wouldn’t have found in the United States. These are also the only souvenirs that have survived the decades from those trips.
I discovered Poems for Laila, a German folk/pop band, and brought home their first two albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Filette Triste on CD, both of which I still count among my favorite albums, and I’ve picked up the rest of their albums digitally over the years.
I got several CD samplers, the first two in the Techno Trax series (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) from ZYX Records and the first two of Zillo Jubilaum’s German Mystic Sound Sampler series (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), and a lot of those tracks were in regular rotation when I started DJing a few years later.
Most painfully in retrospect, on that second trip in ‘91 I remember seeing in-store displays for The KLF’s just-released The White Room, listening to bits of it at listening stations, and thinking it sounded neat but then choosing something else and leaving it behind. The KLF, of course, soon became huge, and I’ve always good-naturedly regretted having missed the chance to have been among the first to play them in the U.S. (and possibly the first in Anchorage).
Listening to any of those albums immediately brings me back to those first European trips; the trips themselves, but also the experience of finding a music store filled with music I didn’t know, browsing through, trying listening stations, and taking chances on things that caught my ear.
Sadly, with online purchasing and streaming having taken its toll, music stores are much fewer and harder to find, and generally cater more to the vinyl collector. Which is fine, and I’m glad they’re able to hang on in some form, but as I’m backpacking around on this trip, picking albums up on vinyl isn’t a terribly realistic plan.
Yes, it’s just an aspect of the modern age, and in many ways, the online purchasing options are both more convenient and (if you actually go for purchasing through storefronts like iTunes, Bandcamp, Qobuz, or the like) better for the artists. But being here and having the memories of those earlier trips and the music I was able to bring home has really been making me miss not having that as an option now.
