A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper
Posted April 20th, 2024 on Niagara At Large
This Saturday, April 20th is Record Store Day – a day set aside each year to celebrate the treasure of good music we can discover at record stores and a day to encourage us to support record stores and not let any more of them die.
As a life-long lover of music, I have been saddened over the past few decades to see the number of great record stores closing, from the grand old Sam the Record Man store on Yonge Street in Toronto to the equally grand Record Theatre store in Buffalo, and all too many record stores in locations in between.
Most of these stores, like growing numbers of news media outlets, have fallen victim to people turning to the sterile, soulless world of the internet for almost everything they want to read, watch and hear.
Record Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y. with a line-up of music fans waiting for the doors to open on a Record Store Day about a decade ago, closed its doors for the last time on one sad end-of-summer day in 2017.
Among the big problems with the internet, aside from the fact that it is contributing to a crisis of loneliness and depression (and why wouldn’t it when people turn it it rather than engage face-to-face on an orgranic level with real people in real communities) is that once that once the BIG MACHINE on the other side of that screen on your smartphone or laptop makes a digitial record of what it decides you want or need, it keeps feeding you the same thing over and over again.
It is like being trapped in what Bob Geldoff, a British musician of Boomtown Rats and Live Aid fame, recently called an “information ghetto.”
In a real record store, you can enter a place where there is a community of people who share a common interest – the love of good music.
There is no beating the sense of community people who love music feel in a good record store. Inside Record Theatre shortly before it closed in 2017. They came back for the store closing discounts. Where were they before? file photo by Doug Draper
It is a community where quite often you can discover, through some new albums people working in the store are playing over an intercom, or through conversations with others record store customers or through just leafing through the vinyl albums or CDs on the shelves, great artists and music you may never have heard before.
So much of the best records I have in my collection at home come from someone in a record store noticing me pick up an album, usually because it had a catchy-looking cover, and saying; “I have that and I love it.” Or they come from some great music being played over the intercom and me going up to a person working in the store and saying; “Wow. Who is hat?”
As I said, we have lost too many record stores already and it would be a sad day if or when the last record store closes its doors.
So Record Store Day serves as a way to remind all of us of what great communities for people who love music these stores can be and to encourage us to give what record stores we have left all the support we can.
In Niagara, unfortunately, there are all too few record stores left.
Niagara Records on St. Paul Street in St. Catharines has a great collection of used CDs and vinyl records.
On the up side, we still have Sunrise Records at the Pen Centre in St. Catharines, and there are two other independent stores that sell new and used records in the city’s downtown – Niagara Records on St. Paul Street and Mind Bomb on adjoining James Street.
Record Store Day should be every day of the year. Help keep these great communities for people who love music alive.
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