perfidy

GeekLethal has tipped me off that Tower Records will finally seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having run out of time, credit, and willing buyers.

Tower is the victim of several forces: the overall decline in recorded-music sales over the past five years; an ill-timed expansion just as sales peaked; rumors of poor financial management; and an inability of management to respond to the changing marketplace. The sow is smaller, and Tower is now sucking hind teat. So to speak.

Some of you may remember that Tower faced bankruptcy a couple years ago and had to close a few of its trademark superstores. By selling off their Japanese division and closing some US branches, they managed to stay alive, but at a cost. I personally felt the loss acutely, because the Tower Records on the corner of Newbury and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston was my dealer of choice of deep-catalog jazz and world music.

And that's the crying shame. Alone among the big stores, Tower was dedicated to carrying extensive back catalogs and relatively obscure artists along with the Top-40 glitz. They always had a wide selection of Jimmy Smith recordings produced by Rudy van Gelder, for example, and usually had a number of Sun Ra's less orthodox offerings as well. Unglamorous music, but wonderful stuff I was happy to buy. Unfortunately for Tower, these days such diversity on the retail side simply means tying up more capital in slowly-moving stock and eventually it killed them. Nowadays it just doesn't pay to carry the weird stuff.

Paradoxically, the opposite may hold for record labels. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolutions points to the bloodbath currently happening in the classical-recording world. All the big labels are shuttering their classical units because the cost of producing yet another recording of Mahler only to sell four thousand copies has now become outrageous. And yet the small labels offering weird music (Boulez, Xenakis, Scriabin) thrive.

What does this all mean? As Cowen says, "Let's not confuse 'good for the suits' with 'good for the consumer.' Big chains like Tower may go the way of the dodo, but that just means the model is dying, not the business underneath.