Sure, it’s great to get trashed on TKK “Christian-Zombie-Vamire,” but after a few hundred times commuting to work with that you’ve gotta detox. I’ve actually made a few stops at Best Buy and fye in town to find something new, to make a connection, and swear off of the trash. These big box record stores are no help! It’s like they want to keep good music a secret and it’s up to you to guess. There are tens of thousands of album covers to judge by, the inventory’s not ordered very well, and the records you want aren’t in stock anyway. There’s the old conventional marketing wisdom that customers will only buy what they see. Put the merchandise out to be noticed, and let voracious consumers like me hear ALL of the music so that they’ll buy the stuff they didn’t know they needed.

I wrote a paper about this in college. I was convinced that people would buy more music if they could download and sample it first. It’s assuming a lot that anyone will take that kind of responsibility. But I’ve taken so many blind (deaf) chances on records in the past when I had no way of knowing what was stamped onto the vinyl. Having Napster for a couple of years was a breakthrough because I could try out any bands I could think of. Not that I could afford to go out and buy all those records, but at least I was much better informed when I could go shopping. Record companies seem conflicted because they want to promote their bands, but they don’t want people to actually access the music.

Amazon does really well to get the merchandise out on display. They pick up on your tendencies to give relevant suggestions, as well as to alert the local authorities if you dwell on Satan-drug-trash bands. I was complaining about how slow the “gift horse” free shipping is, especially the imports (damned curse, I have far-flung predilections). Faced with higher prices and longer delivery (delayed gratification) I opted for the 1-click album download, legit this time. In contrast to the low bit rate and DRM‘ed tracks on iTunes, Amazon’s downloads are pretty liberal. (To be fair, Steve Jobs’ heart is in the right place.) Flipping through the racks of physical records has gotten to be very quaint and my credit card fears the 1-click habit I’m forming.