a good start

The record industry has never been good at selling music. (Meaning retailing music.) They've mostly just allowed people to buy. Sometimes.  Most mainstream stores are just massive warehouses with all the products filed alphabetically. Imagine if most consumer products were sold alphabetically, shows you how dumb it is. There's a prefunctory attempt at segmentation by genre but there's no real thought given to the way that people actually think about their music in the real world.

But maybe HMV are starting to get it right. They've introduced some little islands in the warehouse which introduce an editorial note, a little bit of expertise. The best one is 'if you like this...you'll love this'. It's not genius but it's a start. I wonder if this is influence of Jon and Quiet Storm.

Alternatively, you could shop at these places.

Comments

[Ben]

You still go to record shops?

[Stan Lee]

Trust the Japanese to do it different. Well kind of.

I was looking for a Jap reissue of a Jonathan Richman cd at a megastore whilst I was in Tokyo.

I looked and looked but I couldn't find anything. As you can imagine, I was looking in the R section.

Turned out Richman was displayed in the J section. Along with the likes of Johnny Cash and John Lennon.

When you think about it, this is a nice way of filing music. Apple certainly did, because that's how things are filed in my iPod.

Take a scroll through your artist list and see what I mean.

In a store Bowie is in the same section as Beatles. In my iPod Bowie sits between Dandy Warhols and De La Soul.

[Caio]

aligned with all these stuffs, try www.pandora.com . A nice site playing with this "if you like, you 'll love it" concept. Great songs, huge collections ... very very nice.

Caio

[the hidden persuader]

Very Amazonish: "people who bought this item also bought ...". Lots of high street retail chains could learn a trick or two with Amazon (tehy're so savvy). I particularly like Amazon's "early birding" technique: "pre-order this item today" (even if will only be available in the market in 2 months time.

[Rob Mortimer]

If you like Muse you'll love Queen?
Iffy...

[Luca Vergano]

Don't you feel like big record stores always copied their ideas from magazines?

Like "the record of the month" or "Suggested listening" or stuff like that.

And that's crazy because potentially record stores are like clothing stores, somewhere you go to listen a record, have a chat with the retailer, ask suggestion, see if the record fits your personality.

Not just browsing A.. B... oh, Chestnutt, Vic, that's what I always wanted to hear, I'll give it a try...

HP is right, the stores didn't even went as far as the internet, yet...

[beeker]

Nokia have just announced a new download service whose staffers include David Bowie (as the Uber Recommender) and various bods from top record stores. Personally this is the only model so far that looks like it might come close to that relationship you can have with a record dealer who stashes gems for your next visit because he knows your taste so well. Still not quite there, as not quite as personal, but even so, I think the attempt to recreate intelligent, human service on the internet (as opposed to digital calculations of Muse = Queen) has to be the way forward.

[makethelogobigger]

bleeker's there. The Amazon model always had this creeped-out HAL 2001 feel with suggestions based on my previous purchases.

I have a diverse playlist in my head that Amazon can never anticipate correctly, which works against what I know they’re trying to do.

Their genre categorization process can become annoying.

“Well, if you like this folk singer, let us show you another folk singer.

Another thing that plays off of what beeker said, relates to having a store clerk hold favs for you.

David Byrne streams his own radio show on iTunes. I check it out a lot to see what he’s into.

I’d like to see more of that.