The Main Difference Between CD Stores & Record Stores And Why It Matters!

There's just something about browsing in a record shop that you can never get from a CD store.

You can take a deep breath in a used record store and inhale forty years of rock history. Sometimes its enough to give you a bit of a contact buzz. Just make sure to not take a big snort in the suburbs or all you'll get is a bunch of old Wooden Nickel-era Styx records.

I have no scientific proof to back this up, just hours and hours per week spent in music stores of all shapes, sizes, specialties, and formats over the past four decades.

It is almost as if the warmth of the format itself tends to rub off on the shop itself in some way.

Take a look at the way Championship Records was portrayed in the John Cusack film version of "High Fidelity". If you grew up in Chicago during the '80s, then you know that it could have been based on any one of maybe twenty different Chicago area record stores.

For the most part, though, it was Wax Trax! minus the upstairs clothing department. They captured the grungy D.I.Y. vibe of band stickers plastered everywhere and bins that held some of the most important slabs of vinyl ever made, even if most were on tiny labels.

CD stores, on the other hand, always had the feel of a mall optometrist. "Yay, glasses from the mall! Thanks Mom and Dad!"

To add further insult to injury, used CD stores tend to have the warmth of a parking lot vitamin store all by its lonesome away from all the cool big-box retailers. To get there, you have to drive all the way the middle of the parking lot, get out again, and venture inside to find that they do not have Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You".

"Ah, my home away from home."

These establishments always seem to share space with the vacant remains of what was once a big & tall men's clothing store and what appears to be a yogurt shop that has been threatening to opening soon for the past six months.

Once inside this used compact disc store that always finds some way to work the word "disc" into its name ("Disc Replay" and so on), you quickly realize that their main source of income these days is used video games and their respective systems.

What makes these retailers doubly offensive is that they always have the CD booklets on display instead of the full CDs, which is an obvious space-saver/theft deterrent unless, like me, you just like swiping CD booklets: "Let's see them sell this Pete Cetera solo album NOW!"

(Years later, you go to open the passenger door for your date and hundreds of Peter Cetera CD booklets tumble out, smothering the woman who would have been the love of your life, but, instead left you to care for her pet ferret Theodore)

Even the idea of attempting to "warm up" a CD store draws a natural response of laughter. Admit it, you chuckled because you know as well as I that it can't be done. In fact, you could take the coolest, most incense-infused head shop full of the cutest bra-hating hippie chicks in town, stick it with three rows of used CD booklets, and find yourself choosing to kick it at the library instead.

At least the librarians let you touch the Kraftwerk CD's!

Meanwhile, take the least upscale vinyl store you can think of; one with cardboard boxes in place of record bins run by a guy in an army jacket with a "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" arm band who hands out dirty stares, and its still ten times warmer and more inviting than any ten Disc Planet locations.

So, do you need to wonder why vinyl and cassette are making a comeback?

At the end of the day, people crave warmth.

Try asking the kid behind the counter at Disc Odyssey if he knows which Genesis album has "Misunderstanding" on it. That dead stare says that he's not being paid nearly enough to put up with the constant grilling from the customers.

Meanwhile, across town, someone just asked the guy in the army jacket that exact same question.

His response was much the same - silence - but then he pushes past you as if a sworn enemy has just walked through the door of his establishment. Instead, he tosses a couple boxes full of records aside, flips open another box that appears to be held together with little more than the ink scrawled upon it.

It reads "Fucking Genesis!!!"

He hands you a copy of Duke but then he rifles through the box a little deeper and pushes a copy of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway into your hands.
How's a guy like that stay in business giving you a record every time you buy one?

Great question, maybe the answer is he cares. He might not say a word to you in ten years, but the shit he puts in your bag when you just go in to grab Gary Numan's Telekon can sometimes have beautifully catastrophic repercussions that widen our musical horizons.

Let's see Josh at Discs Etc. do that.