The changing face of selling records

By Liz Crow Hughes

Technology, however, has altered some of the day-to-day aspects of working at the store as well as the industry itself. A very welcome change is the point of sale system. For all you 20-somethings, that’s the red light scanner at the checkout counter. Gone are the days of writing everything we sold in notebooks which the buyers meticulously paged through to put together their weekly orders. As one of said buyers, it’s great to see all the ways the data can be compiled, not to mention I don’t have to decipher the hurried chicken scratchings of my co-workers. 

Probably the biggest change is the way people shop for music. When I first started working at Wax Trax in 1989, MTV used to actually play music videos. They were a big influencer in what people listened to and how they dressed in the 80s and 90s. There was still an underground/alternative culture that created its own trends which were eventually gobbled up by the mainstream. Most people shopped for records based on videos, what they heard on the radio, in clubs and what their friends were listening to.

Nowadays, customers buy albums they already know from start to finish. Obviously, this eliminates the unfortunate experience of buying an album from a one-hit wonder to find the rest of it is boring crud. Anyone remember Trio, Men Without Hats, Re-Flex, or the Church? I remember hurrying home with a bag full of $9 records and listening to them start to finish only to find some major disappointments. 

The biggest influence on my music taste in the late 80s was Rock Island, a popular Denver nightclub that catered to the industrial dance/EBM/goth scene. Hanging out there transitioned into working there, which made it easy to hear all the latest club tunes. My Wax Trax co-workers referred to all the records I played as “grumpy dance music.” I developed a reputation for knowing the bands on the Wax Trax! label and similar sounding groups. Shoppers with similar tastes often sought me out for recommendations. It was fun to talk about music with them. 

These days, customers have their cell phones to keep them current. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-technology. I love Shazam. I just miss the deeper interactions with people about music.

The availability of vinyl is another massive change. Record labels were in their heyday in the 70s and 80s pressing vinyl like crazy. Turkeys like the aforementioned one-hit wonders became “cut-outs.” The labels would take a notch out of the album cover (hopefully not the vinyl within) and sell them at a deep discount to get them out of their warehouses. Wax Trax co-owner Dave Stidman was the cut-out king of North America. He bought them by the truck load much to the chagrin of his business partner Duane Davis  Nowadays it is mostly the CDs that are getting heavily discounted by labels, and most vinyl is not even returnable for retail stores, so gluts of vinyl at the warehouses must be less common.

Streaming services have also changed the way people listen to music.For a while, it seemed that  looking at the cover art, reading the lyrics and liner notes, flipping the record to play the other side were things of the past. Now it seems that streaming is serving the role that radio and listening stations in shops used to, introducing people to a wider variety of music that they then buy a physical copy of. 

Like everything else, selling records has changed a lot since the 80s and 90s. Some of the changes are welcome and some could never have been predicted. The wonderful thing is that music is still an integral part of our lives and always will be.