A few months ago, Jay Cridlin of the Tampa Bay Times Soundcheck blog wrote about the last of the mall-based chain music stores to close in the Tampa Bay area. Jay, like me, will kinda miss these once staples of mall culture. But with MP3s the format du jour, mall music stores were not sustainable. Their closure was inevitable.
However, the closure of mall music stores and their media brethren, the mall book store, is more than just a reflection of our media consumption habits. It means a massive change in how many of us experience the mall. It means the end of mall media browsing as we know it.
When I go to a mall, I don't browse for clothes, I browse for media. For years, every mall trip has meant perusing the racks and shelves of B. Daltons, FYE, Specs, Sam Goode, Walden Books, or any other of dozens of mall music and book stores. For music and book nerds like myself, they were the nirvana of impulse buys.
Where can I browse these days? No book stores, no CD stores. I guess the Apple Store is the best "browsing" spot. But who browses for electronics? I have never impulsively bought a computer or any other electronic component. So even if I were to walk into the Apple Store, I doubt I am walking out of there with anything unless I needed it.
The art of media browsing is dying. Do people really browse on Amazon or iTunes? Is Pandora the new "browsing"? Although I have never used it, my problem with Pandora is that discovery seemingly stays in niches. If I was listening to Metallica, it might take me forever to get the genre to morph into something classical. And that's if they include the Metallica S&M album in their playlist. At the music store, I could go from known metal to unknown classical in the time it took to walk down a different aisle.
Over at his blog on anthropology and economics, anthropologist Grant McCracken gives the outline for an essay (book?) on the death of "the mall" as we know it. Perhaps for some people, the mall is still a cultural destination, a place where they can browse the displays of style or hang out in the food court.
But for me, when the media stores left the mall, so did I.
Unfortunately, I still don't have a place to browse for new stuff.
And I won't even get into the fact that no one buys music for great cover art anymore.
(Disclaimer: I have written for the TBT and my articles have appeared on the TBT Soundcheck blog.)
