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.

Comments

[Gerard @ Interweb World]

> Will movie theaters be next? Somehow, I think not. People love the communal experience.

Cue mental picture of some radical new online 'social' Cinema service where you can send friends virtual popcorn and irritate other patrons. All while watching your movie online. And with RSS feeds.

[Danielle]

What's so chummy and community-oriented about a giant chain records store? Here in Boston, people are far more concerned about the death of the small, independent, owner-fueled shops-- most of which have recently croaked.

[Vera Bass]

What's interesting to me about this post is the view of breaking communal experiences down until only the individual one remains.

I've always viewed this process of commercial and societal change from a completely opposite perspective, as in the aggregation of atoms into a new larger whole that didn't exist previously. Practical example: first Chapters and then Amazon deprived me of valuable human contact in hundreds of wonderful local bookstores which are long gone.

From the same view, though, there are examples that have gone full circle during the 20th century, ie. from the isolated use of Sears mail order back to essentially the same thing. Come to think of it, we're even back to writing to one another instead of congregating downtown.

On a personal note, I agree that change is usually as much about loss as gain.

Vera

[joel]

If you've spent any time at Tower Records, particularly back in the day, it's not a "giant chain records store." There were only a handful of stores, and in addition to the 1000 industry approved titles the chains carry, Tower had amazing import, jazz, blues and classical record sections. For 20 years I visited Tower at least once a week.

[Mike Abundo]

The comics shop I frequented in high school closed when I was in college. They said it was because Filipino kids were getting into computers.

You're not alone, Steve.

[Mike McKinnon]

I was just talking with some of my co-workers about this. She commented on how poor the service was at the local Post Office and we began to wonder when old fashioned snail mail would go the way of the dodo. We then started talking about magazines, movies, and paper currency. Are these all destined for extinction?

[MacQ]

Yeah, it's ironic that the location in San Francisco has a big sign: "The difference is SELECTION!" Oh how true, and how that was the death of them compared to the e-tailers. I wrote a piece about this called Long Tail Wallops Tower records you might enjoy.

[eszter]

I was surprised by the stats about European media consumption so I followed the link to the original FT article, which makes it clear that this is about overall online time vs time spent on print media. But isn't this a bit like comparing apples and oranges? A good chunk of online time is spent on email, which is not a very good parallel to time spent reading hard-copy newspapers.