The Future Of Indy Music Stores

Across the music industry we almost seem to enjoy talking about the inevitble demise of music retail.  But while it’s true that digitial distribution may make music retaiL obsolete and too many music stores are so out of touch with their customers they don’t deserve to stay in business, you have to admit it would be sad if you could never look forward to a rainy Sunday shifting through the CD bins at a cool store around the corner from your apartment.

Well fortunately there is still hope thanks to a few indy retailers that work at being in touch with their customers.  The Coalition Of Independent Music Stores is one of several groups of retailers banding together to share info and build collective clout.  CIMS founder

"In the current Rolling Stone (12-30), there is an article by Steve Knopper entitled "CD Sales Collapse" in huge letters. I talked to Steve for this article but my news was not reported. Our stores are killing it this Christmas. When I reported that a few weeks ago, one major distribution President asked me how that is happening when Soundscan is telling him that the indie sector is way down.

Well, first of all, we have been ultra aggressive this year about finding things that bands own themselves and sell on the road. We bring in big quantity on those titles and do enough marketing so that the customer thinks it is a giant new release. For us, it IS a giant new release. And, we don’t bother getting these titles Soundscanned because who cares? We are not playing radio games or getting people paid by the scans so why bother. Some recent pieces we bought directly from bands that are selling like hotcakes are Daniel Lanois’ release "Rockets" and the Radiohead DVD "The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time". We are also recording and releasing instore performances with great success. Our most recent, "Rilo Kiley Live at Fingerprints" is doing amazing business. Stores feature titles like these (non-distributed and out of the mainstream) in all of their email marketing and in the stores. Our thinking is that it sure helps to have something cool and generally unavailable to compete with $7.99 U2 CDs at the Beast.

Secondly, Mike Dreese at Newbury Comics caused wide panic in the indie store community over five years ago by telling us we would be out of business by now if we didn’t diversify our offerings. Most good indie stores took that advice to heart. Many of our members spend as much time at lifestyle trade shows buying cool things that music fans want as they do at SXSW or NARM. Many indies also share success trends with each other on a regular basis. The biggest diversification item is obviously the DVD, musical and theatrical. Many of our owners are aggressively buying DVDs that are not in the mainstream in addition to the big releases that are everywhere."

CIMS LETTER CONTINUED…