www.cdconnection.com has so much great search, good in stock deliverys. www.allmusic.com BMG Music Service has all kinds of sales lately, free shipping, 50% off all kinds of different offers each week and stuff.

There may be hope for the future. Until about two months ago, there was an active independent record shop (records, not CD's) about three miles from my home located in a large strip mall with lots of traffic. Then the owner lost his lease. The record shop and two adjacent businesses were to be replaced with a large national retail outlet. Much to my surprise, the threat to this small business became a local "cause" - not one but two local daily papers openly lamented the possible loss to the community. The most recent news coverage celebrated the grand opening at a new location - this time less than two miles from my home and with an almost ideal traffic situation - adjacent to a Starbucks. The world will be a better place if this series of events represents a new trend.

Checkout Goldmine monthly magazine, it's got LP's galore!!! Ads from hundreds of record stores everywhere

There is one other factor not mentioned, rising rents. I used to be a steady customer of East 22nd St. Records (in Mnahattan, NYC), but the whole block was cleared out for a Restoration Hardware store. A awful lot of records have to be sold to cover rent, utilities, and salary.

Every medium and large downtown city has at least a few indie record stores. Today they are mostly small and stock mostly used titles.

But they could all disappear tomorrow and "no one" would miss them. Not because they don't possibly offer a unique buying experience, but because they've never been missed to begin with by most of us. Unless you live right in the neighborhood, you've likely never been to one.

The "High Fidelity"-type of store hasn't been prevalent for the rest of us since the 1970s.

This excerpt from http://tulsatvmemories.com/records.htm digs a little deeper and summarizes it well --- but mostly shows (accurately, in my view) that all of this really pre-dates the downloading phenomenon by quite a bit:

Quote:
The death of the independent record store came about with Peaches, which later turned into Buttons, and is now Blockbuster Entertainment (and now a furniture store...webmaster). Peaches was a record warehouse with over a million dollars in inventory. Virtually every domestic record in print was sitting there in the middle of Tulsa.. Around the same time Woodland Hills Mall also came in and suddenly there was no need to go anywhere else for records. Radio stations started narrow-casting and putting certain songs in heavy rotation. AM radio was turning into an all-talk format. MTV homogenized popular music taste from coast to coast. The days when the local disc-jockey could play anything he wanted were long gone. Music became contained to such an extent that even the local Sears could stock the records that were likely to sell.

Though we have independent music dealers in the area, I miss the days when you could go into a record store and have no earthly idea of what you were going to come out with.

Nostalgia Alert!
As a kid just exploring music and audio, Peaches was a wonderland palace. The closest one to me in north St. Louis was in what used to be a large grocery store. It had a dozen or more Bose 901s mounted up high all around, one of the nicer Duals feeding a Marantz preamp and a big Phase Linear amp. (I just "know" that Bob Carver had to source the huge VU meters from the same people who provide them to nuclear facilities.) Pacific Stereo, my first favorite stereo shop, was just down the street. Down the way a small Honda motorcycle dealer had begun selling new Civics and Accords on one corner of his lot. You get the idea.

Here's an obit for Peaches, from the NY Times:

Quote:
Peaches Debt Filing

UPI
Published: June 5, 1981
Peaches Records and Tapes, a Los Angeles-based record chain with 35 stores [presumably in NY? --- deckeda], filed for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act. The company, citing $20 million in debts, attributed its problems to a sharp decline in demand for phonograph records.

Ah yes, the cassette. The '80s MP3 devil. Wish I had my Peaches crates still.

In later years, the various Streetside Records (for me) took their place; I never lived near real indies like Euclid Records and Vintage Vinyl.

http://www.euclidrecords.com/
http://www.vintagevinyl.com/

But of course, talk of St. Louis record stores isn't complete without mentioning Webster Records.

http://www.websterrecords.com/wr_history.html

There is a great indie record store in Spokane WA called 4000 Holes (www.4000holes.com)(great Beatles collections). He used to only carry used vinyl plus CDs, both new & used. Recently he started carrying new vinyl because his CD sales were dropping due to downloading and found that adding new vinyl increased sales. He will order what he doesn't have in stock and it usually takes less than a week. It's a great place to spend a few hours on a cloudy, rainy or snowy day. Great music and great conversation. What is really cool is seeing young kids come into the store and buy records.

Whenever I travel I always check the yellow pages for a record store and I have always been able to find at least one in every city of every size, from Santa Fe NM to Denver & Phoenix. The indie record store is not dead.