When I visited Japan for the first time a few months ago, I wandered upon a record shop that had the largest selection of Beatles records (both re-releases and originals from the 60's) I've ever seen. And the speakers in the store played only Beatles song covers by all types of different groups (country, punk, new-age, you name it).
As a Beatles junkie, it was so cool. And a very grounding moment for someone still experiencing a bit of culture shock, to share something in common with this culture.
I went to a very large music store in a heavily trafficked area of Portland recently and realized how useless this type of store has become. Unlike a bookstore, it's not fun to "browse" music physically, we have become spoiled by services such as spotify.
A good music store has excellent curation, which is still not a solved problem for online stores. (IMDB's "People who liked this also liked..." has got much worse over time.)
There's also a bunch of sub-culture signalling, which I accept is off-putting to many people. But the fact that at least two reasonably good films were set in record stores means something.
>A good music store has excellent curation, which is still not a solved problem for online stores
I'm not sure it's truly a solved problem for brick and mortar, either. For a big box, curation is generally done at the corporate level, and their staff are not much more knowledgeable than the average patron.
Record stores are doing great where I live in the Netherlands, and I couldn't disagree more that it's not fun to browse a music store. I love spending an afternoon flipping through records; fortunately there are 8-9 of them whose owners haven't decided were useless within an hour and a half of me. Some, like Rush Hour in Amsterdam, really are thriving and often very crowded. That one in particular frequently has DJs and hosts radio shows on occasion.
* chatting with the owner who is supremely knowledgeable about the kinds of music I like, and buying records based on his advice
* looking for something similar to music I've found online, perhaps by the same artist or label
* looking for music I can't easily stream online, such as jazz from the ECM label. I stumbled upon one album while digging last time I went that I'd had in my sights for a while, but bought it for half what it would have cost on discogs (like an eBay/catalog for music). Or the Zimbabwean soukous album I just got that is super funky that doesn't exist online at all, and I'd never have heard had I not picked it up in the record shop for a listen.
* looking at cool things that I won't easily find online but probably also won't actually buy (e.g. the €70 original pressing 1970s Ghanaian highlife, or any other unusual rarity)
I'm super passionate about music and I love everything about the physical aspects of vinyl, so hopefully now you can see how ridiculous it is to suggest that record stores are useless because Spotify and the like exist. I'm listening to Spotify all the time too, but I definitely love my records more. I'm definitely not the only one.
No, I haven't yet. I do have a good phono preamp with a digital output for digitizing records that I got as an open-box deal. I have one album that doesn't exist online anywhere so I've been thinking about uploading it to Youtube, but I really adore listening to the physical format at home. At work I'm always listening to Spotify or something.
I tend to curate my record collection to albums I really love, so often it happens that I'll seek out something on vinyl that I'm already familiar with.
I find it much easier to discover something I don't know but enjoy if I purchase. A bookstore is fun to browse too but I find the chance of success much lower and the investment much higher. I guess it all does depend on the type of store you try. Large retailers are going to be a much different experience than small niche stores although both have their pros and cons.
I would be very interested in an article about how people still shop and select music in these stores. Most doujin music artists post cross-fade previews on Soundcloud so you know what you want before going, but I don't think that's true of all genres.
I witnessed Tower Records asplode in 2007 in graphic detail when a very large and very well-stocked Tower shop jn Portland, OR was forced to sell off every scrap of inventory (allowing me to stock up on Danger Mouse (the cartoon, not the DJ) DVDs, among other things).
Imagine my surprise when I landed in Osaka in 2011 and saw Tower Records still very much a thing there.
That said, they had some idea what they were doing: they cut the least profitable 25% of their artists and SKUs, dropping unit sales by 4.1%, then blamed "piracy":
I remember reading article about Japan and fax machines. A lot of lunch takeout places still have a very high fax traffic because they accept orders via fax.
As a Beatles junkie, it was so cool. And a very grounding moment for someone still experiencing a bit of culture shock, to share something in common with this culture.