Click or Brick?

The commonly held belief amongst (admittedly older) music consumers is that you haven’t really made it as a band until your album is available in the shops. I know full well from the experiences I’ve had working the ‘unsigned/toilet circuit’ up to the ‘band is signed, has record deal and tours’ level that your average punter used to judge you by whether or not you had your own name divider in HMV or not, rather than what the heck your band sounded like or if you were any good.
Now, you’ll have had to have been walking round with your head in the sand if you were unaware of the current dilemma facing the music biz at the moment. The advent of digital downloads, file sharing and the resultant plummet of physical cd sales means the old school method of controlling artist output via big labels is just too sprawling and slow to react to be of any use anymore. Yet having your album ‘in the shops’ still seems to carry a certain gravitas with certain sections of the public. It’s clearly hard to break that old notion that if it’s not available at the record shop, no-one is going to buy it.
Just recently, there have been more than a couple of offers for The Dreaming Tree to get their albums into stores via distribution deals, and we’ve been pondering whether or not to take the offer up. It would mean our records are ‘in the shops’, and even within what are the (hopefully!) enlightened ranks of TDT, and our determination to stay outside the boundaries of ‘conventional’ music business models, there is still a whiff of excitement that getting to that stage would add an air of kudos and, for want of a better word, legitimacy, about seeing the band’s work in a retail outlet.
However, we need to stop and just question what is actually on the table here. I know from personal experience as a music lover that of all the time I spend in a shop, I’m bound to only see and look at a fraction of the music on offer. More likely, I’m going to go for stuff I know and am familiar with, and then if I’m faced with a choice of getting the latest record from Metallica, or an album by a band I’ve not heard of but who look like they could be interesting, I’ll probably be putting my £15 on the Bay-area Thrash legends. Far more important than that, though, is the hitherto unconsidered idea that actually finding the shop may soon prove more problematic than finding the record within.
My brother recently returned from a short break in Manhattan, NYC, where he expressed more than a little surprise that he couldn’t find any of the shops he used to frequent over there. HMV on 5th Avenue, Virgin in Times Square and other shops that used to be a thriving mecca have all, without exception, closed down. The reason for this has to undoubtedly be the impact of declining physical CD sales. I myself recently walked around York and saw yet another Zavvi being gutted after their collapse. The one HMV I did find had masses of DVDs, loads of console games, a hefty literature section (?) and about 2 racks of CDs, stashed almost apologetically at the back of the store out of harm’s way.
Essentially, the retail outlet seems to be well on the way out of fashion. Supermarket chains now carry the bulk of the record companies’ releases, so you’ll have no problems picking up the next X Factor Idol Strictly on Ice’s record from Tesco. For the rest of us, however, it seems that online is where everything is going to be. Certainly when you consider the difference in pricing that online providers can achieve compared to normal stores, shopping on the web is a no-brainer.
The conclusion therefore has to be that the limited resources of the ‘DIY’ band need to be firmly targeted at the point that is likely to garner the most return. In this case, online retail. Especially as getting your CD ‘in the shops’ these days would seem to suggest that your work is going to be seen as a bit of an obstruction to the spotty gamers desperate to reach the latest copy of Grand Theft Auto...