The digital age of entertainment

WHEN HMV went into administration, it showed once more that how people access music has changed dramatically, resulting in a once ultra-profitable business model becoming archaic.

Record shops are almost all gone now and the increasing popularity of digital reading devices has led to uncertainty about the future for institutions like libraries and bookshops. For a generation of young people, the Record Rack in Ennis was one of the town’s landmarks, offering one of the few local sources of new music, posters and concert tickets.

David Woodford opened it in 1982 but three years ago, the Record Rack closed its doors and he opened up the Irish Shop at the same location. Speaking to The Clare Champion last Thursday, shortly after the HMV staff sit-in had got underway, he said he wasn’t surprised at the turn of events.

“It’s been coming. We kind of saw it coming from around 2004 or 2005, once the Ipod was introduced and people started downloading for it, it was only natural that they were going to start buying CDs and DVDs and any kind of general media like that online, from the likes of Amazon and so on.

“We kind of started to diversify then, while we remained a record shop up until three years ago, we had started to diversify and to do a little bit more gifts and crafts and t-shirts and things. The music business continued to decline so three years ago we took the bull by the horns and changed over to a gift and craft shop.”

There is still some demand for CDs and they are selling a few all the time. “More recently, we’ve introduced some more popular CDs simply because people haven’t been able to get them because of the decline. All of the record shops have now closed, between Galway and Limerick, there were only two record shops and they were both HMVs and now they’re gone so people have been trickling back to us who don’t like downloading their music, who like to physically have it in their hand so we’ve started doing it again in a smaller way.

“It’s never going to be as big as it was but I think it will trickle back a little bit. There have been changing times, online shopping has hit all areas of retail but I think particularly music and books, it’s just a matter of trying to change and do something a little bit different, while still doing the music but doing other things as well.”

He says the decline in sales of recorded music has made the world’s top acts more accessible to Irish audiences, while he also feels the decline of the record store needn’t have been as dramatic. “To the public’s advantage I suppose that’s why you see more tours now coming to Ireland, all the big names come now, they have to tour now to make their money. At the end of the day, the record companies shot themselves in the foot. All the independent record shops saw this coming years ago, we actually formed a group and approached the record companies and said ‘look, you have to lower your prices’. They were making a fortune at the time because the music business was so strong but they weren’t prepared to lower their prices. We could see that something had to be done but the record companies weren’t prepared to budge because they had it too good. Had they moved earlier, it might have survived because if they dropped the prices of CDs and music early on the internet mightn’t have had such an impact.”

One of the things he liked about running a record shop was that it was something of a focal point where people met and talked. “It’s sad that’s gone and I don’t think it’ll ever come back.”

While recorded music has become something that people download, often for free, bookshops are still common and according to county librarian Helen Walsh, the use of kindles and e-readers hasn’t turned people off traditional books. She notes in 2009, there were 350,250 visits to full-time libraries in Clare but the figure had increased to 384,450 in 2012. She says the demise of the book has been predicted for some time but is still some way off. “When I was in library college, the whole thing was the future was going to be electronic. The reality is it hasn’t happened.

“We had a meeting of county librarians recently and it comes up at nearly all of our meetings and we were never busier than we are at the moment. Our issues over the last number of years have just gone up and up and up. The numbers using our branches and the number of people reading has increased so we haven’t seen that in relation to the printed word. We do have a small element of downloadable audiobooks on our website, there are a small percentage of people using that but it certainly isn’t anything compared to the amount of people using the standard, traditional form of reading.”

With some schools delivering education through digital means now rather than books, she says the picture may change but there are advantages to books that digital devices can’t match, for now at least.

“We interact with children at storytime and you have a picture book, which is a lovely way of sitting with a group of kids and engaging with them You’re showing the pictures to the kids, and you’re interacting with them, they’re talking back to you, answering questions that you might ask about the story you’re reading to them and you don’t get that with an electronic device.”

Libraries now have a lot to offer now, which complement the traditional function of making books available to the community, she feels.

“I know you can download things but on a visit to a library, you can pick up a DVD, pick up a music CD, read the newspaper, go on the internet, you can read a book, so there’s a lot happening around reading and other forms of recreation and entertainment.”