Where do you get your music?

One of our little categories/offerings at the shop is music. Old-school, plastic-wrapped cds that come with cover art and sometimes lyrics inside. The ones you can hold in your hands and study. The ones that have irritating sticky strips that take five minutes to remove.

It's kind of a dying vehicle, those factory-fresh cds. There are so many online, downloadable options now, not to mention the totally illegal practice of burning cds for friends. We love music (love!), and will continue to search it out and offer what we think is noteworthy. And we thank that loyal group of customers who like what we like and buy much of their music from us.

But here's the thing: the time spent sourcing/vetting new music is a wee bit excessive (but I'm a night owl and don't get paid by the hour, so who cares?), and the wholesale prices we pay are high. Very high. On top of that, some of the more esoteric and interesting artists are not readily available from the distributors. Like everyone else trying to stay alive today, distribution houses are focusing on mainstream offerings -- the stuff that sells.

I guess I'm in a bit of a funk about it. It started a few days ago with the release of the new Pink Martini album. Big fans, we are (although we don't love everything they do). I had the release date on the calendar, to be sure to have the cds in stock. Then I listened to it, or snippets anyway. Eh. Some really, really good songs interspersed with a couple of clunkers (four clunkers, to be exact). Perhaps we're too critical, but when you play the album in a store, you don't want to listen to anything that's too weird or bad or frantic or irritating. Or off pitch. It puts shoppers in the wrong frame of mind. We only play cds that we have for sale; that way, you get to walk around listening to it before you buy it. So it has to be good all the way through.

I also noted on the calendar that a new Jack Johnson cd was being released on the same day. Yay! Oh. It's a live album of everything you've heard before, only with clapping and woo-hooing.

The same day, we saw Sting on The Today Show performing a piece from his new winter/christmas album, If on a Winter's Night. Okay, that's good... like it. It only got 1.5 stars on the general review-o-meter, maybe because some were hoping for the "old" Sting of Roxanne style. This is way more contemplative and soft. English madrigals and ancient folk songs. I thought I detected a whiff of Fairport Convention in there. It's a christmas album, and I'd rather listen to that than most of the hokey christmas fare out there. If you really want to torture me (and possibly inflict permanent damage), put me in a locked room with that god awful new Bob Dylan christmas album, Christmas in the Heart. Oi! I think he should be forced to do about 1,000 Hail Marys for that one... and go apologize to the Wailing Wall.

Back to Sting. The new album is interesting enough that I went to my wholesale ordering site to check it out. Wholesale price is $11.99, with a suggested retail of $16.98. Let me tell you that that's not a very good margin, given that we usually try to lower the suggested retail. And that we have to pay 50¢ to $1 per cd for shipping, depending on how many we buy. And that we have to buy a play copy if we hope to sell any of them. I did the math: we buy five copies at $11.99 + $5 shipping + one play copy @ $11.99. Total: $76.94. We sell five copies at $15.95 for a total of $79.75. That leetle margin is a sneeze towards covering all the expenses a retail store has, not to mention two people working full speed ahead, and those voraciously hungry birds that can go through a bag of seed in a few days...

But here's the real kicker, math and margins aside. You can buy this particular album at a certain big box for $9.99. Yes, less than we pay wholesale. So what do I do? Nix a good album just because big retailers are willing to lose money on it and pay you to come buy it from them (in the hopes that you'll buy something else that actually has a profit margin)? Years ago I was a rep for a distribution company that sold to chain drug stores. The stores would buy Clorox bleach from us for maybe 89¢ per unit and sell it for 92¢. That was a loss leader. The teeny margin didn't add to the store's health, but it got people in the door. This new strategy from the big boxes, buying books for $20 and selling them for $10, why that's just genius!

Now don't go thinking of me as all bitter and grumpy. We're going to keep looking for and bringing in music. A house without music is like a house without books -- unthinkable! We'll do the best we can to find interesting albums we think you'll like. You'll always be able to come in and listen and get recommendations. For the rest of it, for stuff we can't get (or imports that are truly, ridiculously expensive), I'll occasionally post some links for laudable offerings from iTunes. I think it's a great resource, even though I'd rather be selling some of this stuff from our store.

Back to our subject line: where do you get your music? How do you choose what you want and where do you find it? When do you listen to it? What kinds of music do you like?

Okay: here's a little prize for getting to the bottom of this rant. Here are a few of my obscure favorites you can find on iTunes.

Gretchen Parlato: get her self-titled album. We can order her second album (In a Dream) but don't like it nearly as much as the first! Great Brazilian tunes, and a few in English. Sort of a soft, bossa nova/jazz theme all the way through, but not boring. You could play it during any dinner party, and everybody would be happy.

Francoise Hardy, Clair Obscur. Hardy is a famous French pop icon from the 60s and 70s and I find a lot of her stuff to be kind of fizzy and well, pop. But I love this album, and we used to sell it in the store, but because it is one of those dang imports, it retailed for about $22 (and we paid $19.95 for it!). You can get it for $9.99 on iTunes. Speaking of pop, one of my favorite songs on the album (this one belongs at the end of a romantic movie!!) is I'll Be Seeing You, a kind of funky rendition sung with -- don't gag now -- Iggy Pop. Uh, not normally my favorite guy. Iggy Pop, like rum & coke, only remind me of some really bad dates in my youth. Icky.

Last (not least... have to save some for another post), check out this guy named Vinx. Who is he? A revelation (to me; maybe he's well-known?). He's classified under R&B/Soul, but he really defies classification. Love his album, The Mood I'm In. There's this rolling, sweet beat all the way through. Little reminders of Bobby McFerrin, sometimes. An afro/caribbean/brazil percussion section. And a great voice. If nothing else, buy the song You Are My Sunshine. It's got to be the best version ever, with its West African beat, or wait, is that a slow-burning samba section?

Let us know how you like these!