The End of an Era

This weekend, I learned that my local Tower Records store and many others in the chain are going out of business. It's sad, but expected. My friend Rob and I spent hours and hours there back when we were in college at Hofstra University in the late 1980s. Though I frequent the same shopping center virtually every weekend to go to the cleaners, I haven't been to Tower Records since I bought my first song on iTunes.

This gets me thinking, what's next? Drive-in movie theaters are gone. Will movie theaters be next? Somehow, I think not. People love the communal experience.

So what about bookstores? Ebooks and audiobooks are hardly mainstream today, but who knows about tomorrow.

What about magazines, newsstands and newspapers? This week at the ANA Annual Conference Meredith dropped off a stack of thick magazines at everyone's hotel room. So magazines sure seem healthy, but the demise of the print newspaper seems like it might come true as their online franchises soar. In Europe, people are already spending more time with online media than they are with offline. (Thanks to Stephen Davies for the link.)

My point here is not to play the prediction game. That's easy. Rather, it's to remind us that things are constantly changing. New technologies and habits replace old ones. Remain complacent with what you have in atoms and you might be disappointed when it moves to bits. In marketing and PR we need to always be mindful of this flow. That's because one day, everything will be bits.