No Future Interrobang

[Karl Henning]

Vinyl peaked with disco, didn't it? . . .

Davey, where'd your post viz. Michael Jackson go? Thriller was huge, and must indeed have played the role you mentioned.

I lived through it, but as my musical interests were elsewhere, Thriller was That Which I Chose Not To See; and of course, at the time, no one could foresee other media to supplant the vinyl LP.  Indeed, few people would have suggested that any popster could outdo the success of Thriller (I suppose that, technically, Abba Gold would not count, as a compilation of previously released material); but none of us would have pegged that to the last gasp of vinyl, which at the time suffered from no visible weakness.  Cassettes, for all their portable usefulness, were always an adjunct (except for cassette-fetishists, je-je-je) to LPs.  And 8-tracks were the Vanilla Coke of the music media world . . . .

[DavidW]

After I posted that Karl I saw that your post was from December and I thought you don't care about it now so I deleted it!

[kishnevi]

1. Do you even know where I live? I live in the small town NE of Atlanta, GA. We do not have any decent music stores whatsoever. The CD stores that are still here have the following: a. recordings that I don't want or b. recordings that I already have and this includes the city of Atlanta.

MI, you're probably like me.  Reading through this thread this morning,  I realized that my CD collection is bigger than the classical section at the brick and mortar Barnes and Nobles (there's four in my area that carry CDs/DVDs), and they have almost nothing I want--except for some new releases from EMI and DG (not all) and some opera DVDs.   Actually,  add in their jazz section and it would still be smaller than my collection, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than yours (I have roughly 2000 CDs, and I think I remember you once mentioned a considerably higher figure than that.)    It's not so much pricing--their member coupons often result in a discount that comes out to about the same as buying online--but simply the choices are not there for me.  I don't want Andrea Bocelli, Divo and Domingo's greatest hits, or somebody's re-release of Beethoven 9 that I probably already have anyway.   They don't have (for example) anything from CPO.  Borders was somewhat better, but we know what happened to Borders....

End result--to get what I'm interested in, I have to shop online.  Local purchases are not an option.

[Mirror Image]

MI, you're probably like me.  Reading through this thread this morning,  I realized that my CD collection is bigger than the classical section at the brick and mortar Barnes and Nobles (there's four in my area that carry CDs/DVDs), and they have almost nothing I want--except for some new releases from EMI and DG (not all) and some opera DVDs.   Actually,  add in their jazz section and it would still be smaller than my collection, which I'm pretty sure is smaller than yours (I have roughly 2000 CDs, and I think I remember you once mentioned a considerably higher figure than that.)    It's not so much pricing--their member coupons often result in a discount that comes out to about the same as buying online--but simply the choices are not there for me.  I don't want Andrea Bocelli, Divo and Domingo's greatest hits, or somebody's re-release of Beethoven 9 that I probably already have anyway.   They don't have (for example) anything from CPO.  Borders was somewhat better, but we know what happened to Borders....

End result--to get what I'm interested in, I have to shop online.  Local purchases are not an option.

Yes, we're both in the boat then. To get what we want, we have no other choice but to buy online. I, too, have noticed this trend in the B & N stores I've visited where they carry recordings in their classical section like Joshua Bell's Greatest Performances or Lang Lang plays Liszt. You know basically recordings that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. Anyway, I'm done wasting my own time searching for something that I know I'll never find. Everything I want has been found online. The Borders that was near me, which closed down several years ago, had, at one time, a decent classical and jazz section, but when the economy hit them, their CD section dwindled down to nothing. When they closed down, I managed to get a few recordings 50 to 60% off. I remember buying the Rattle Brahms' Requiem on EMI and Shostakovich's Symphonies 5 & 9, which was a Bernstein Century recording. I think also bought Holst The Planets again on a Bernstein Century recording. I got these for about $3-$4 each which was a better deal than online. I'll kind of miss that, but, like you said, you can forget labels like Ondine, BIS, CPO, or Chandos being stocked, because that simply wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, thousands of recordings later, I'm still on the search for more recordings...