Remember record stores? Last Saturday was supposed to be Record Store Day, and in the new normal, would-be crate diggers looking for a fix had resorted to online shopping. It’s kind of ironic; the very digital infrastructure that makes it fairly easy to stay in contact and buy things while sheltering-in-place contributed to the demise of indie record stores in the first place. But that’s not the only reason your favorite retail outlet called it quits. A documentary by Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller documents the final days of a defining New York record store that was forced to shut its doors in 2016; the reasons for its demise are varied and in at least one case surprising. Other Music is a must-see for anybody who visited that beloved storefront or ordered online or read its widely disseminated email newsletters, which were for years one of the very best ways to learn about music outside of the mainstream.
Other Music opened its doors in 1995, defiantly setting up shop across the street from a block-long Tower Records on W 4th Street. With a fraction of the floor space and an idiosyncratic categorization whose main bins were marked “In” and “Out,” this was not your corporate record store. Hand-written notecards marked a small but crucial display of favorites from staff who were hand-picked for their dedication to music on the fringes of recorded experience—and an enthusiasm to seek out something beyond what everybody else was listening to.
It’s not hyperbole to claim that OM may have packed more interesting music into its square footage than any record store in history. Ask anyone who frequented the place, or even stepped in there just once, and you’ll hear stories of consumers who had to walk away after amassing a substantial pile of expertly-curated discs in a matter of minutes. With frequent in-store events, the shop became an essential music hub in one of the world’s greatest cities. So what happened?
One frequent customer, Regina Spektor laments – in a sentiment all too apt for these times – that music fans increasingly gravitated online and away from the bookstores, record stores and nightclubs where people gathered in person to form an arts community. Although a few interview subjects, including former employees, remember a bad mood when they were rude to a customer or dismissed them because they were looking for something as mainstream as a Stevie Ray Vaughan album, store co-founder Chris Vanderloo makes it clear that the urgent need to share music was one of the very reasons he opened up in the first place. Yet the changing consumer landscape and New York’s predatory real estate market weren’t all the shop was fighting. As much as it bad been a boon for indie retailers, the vinyl resurgence became a problem. CDs were cheaper and quicker to make, and as vinyl took over the precious few sales bins, the store’s already tight profit margins took a hit.
Someone, like this writer, who spent lots of time and money in the store and recognizes a lot of people on screen may have a stronger connection to the end of a store that was a big part of music discovery for two decades. But anyone who’s felt that thrill of musical discovery will recognize how important this shop was, and how much that discovery has changed with technology. Perhaps Other Music documents a history that’s too recent to fully resonate. But, in the aftermath of the current crisis, the fate of independent record stores seems more uncertain than ever, which may make this, sooner rather than later, a bittersweet memory of endangered brick-and-mortar music shops.
The post Other Music appeared first on Spectrum Culture.