The current US retail model is dying. Online services such as Napster, BitTorrent, and even Amazon have been slowly revolutionizing the way America, and even the world as a whole, does business. We are no longer a world completely dominated by the masses. Online services have been popping up all over the place that cater just as much to the individual as to the mass market, and what effects does this have on us, the individuals? The masses? Availability, for one. I remember being younger and going to a blockbuster, and every time I went I’d be looking for The Duck Tales Movie, a movie that no blockbuster in my area ever carried. With one word search and one button click on Amazon.com, I found the movie I always looked for. The convenience of online availability negated multiple years of on and off searching in less than five minutes. The niche markets were always largely ignored by most physical retailers because of their own physical limitations. Limitations such as shipping, packaging, marketing, etc.
Online retailers are often one of the first places one would look for an obscure book or movie, because when you’re shopping online, the physical product could come from anywhere in the world it may still exist. The convenience of knowing that within five minutes of browsing, you can find a used original print of The Catcher in the Rye and have it in 3-5 business days is more efficient in every way than trudging from bookseller to bookseller trying in vain to find such a hard to find book.
Thanks in some part to laziness. People, especially people past their teens and getting on with their lives, don’t necessarily have time to sit around and sift through media to find music, movies, or authors that aren’t immediately there in front of them. The ready availability of digital media with its open and broad catalogues such as Rhapsody, which carries over 700,000 music tracks, puts out things that aren’t as well known on equal footing as bands like Led Zeppelin. With our digital lives becoming a bigger and bigger part of our individual lives as the generation come and go, I now find children I know that know more obscure movies and artists than I’ve ever even heard of.
The problem with Digital Resources though, and I don’t know if it’s so much a problem as a personal grudge, but the onset of this new market will change the face of the one that currently exists. When individual tracks are readily available, the form of records will change with the times, perhaps even ceasing to exist. Flash Drives catalogued with e-books will replace bookshelves and so forth. Another point to be made is the loss of novelty. Everything is catering more to the buyer, almost to the point of mothering a child and hand-feeding them everything. There used to be a joy in finally tracking down that elusive CD from a local record store you’ve been seeking for a long time. There’s convenience, and then there’s a feeling of triumph, an both sit on opposite ends of the see-saw.
The bottom line is that such niche audiences have always existed, it’s just not until recently have they been catered to in any way. Now, corners of the market are seemingly the first place for digital retailers to set up shop. In the years to come I see a hopefull downfall of record companies as they exist today, and generally just look forward to seeing how everything will continue to change
