E-Mail This Article to a Friend No fidelity (continued)

Of course, by treating music as just another entertainment commodity, the record business has contributed to the crisis, because there’s now a new generation of consumers who are also apt to view music as a commodity. They’re still consuming it, but more and more of that consumption is taking the form of MP3 downloading. That’s hurt retail on every level. And the one advantage the used-record store had in being able to sell used records and then CDs for less than the chain stores sell new product has also been undercut as major players like Best Buy have begun to use music as a loss leader to bring consumers into the store to spend big money on electronic items.

"When Best Buy starting being able to undercut our prices, that really hurt us," Soria admits. "But we still have the deals. We just don’t have the traffic that we used to. And if people don’t come to the store, then there just isn’t going to be a store. Our business isn’t that different from any other business selling records. Everybody’s hurting."

Indeed, other used-record stores around town are feeling the crunch. CD Spins, a chain of five used-CD stores, is up for sale. So far, only one location — 54 Church Street in Harvard Square — has been purchased; it’s in the process of changing its name to On Church Street. But stores like Nuggets, Planet Records, and Looney Tunes — all of which have been key to the grassroots infrastructure of the local music scene — seem to be meeting the challenge in different ways. Unlike Disc Diggers, this trio have continued to make vinyl a vital part of their business. But to greater or lesser extent, everybody is following Disc Diggers’ lead onto the Internet, both by using eBay and their own Web sites to sell product on line.

"I’ve had stuff hanging around the store for months, and I’ll put it up on eBay and it’ll sell right away," admits Nuggets owner Stuart Freedman, who started working in the store a month after it opened at its original Kenmore Square location in 1978 and then bought it a decade and a half ago. "But we do well enough in the store that I still spend more time trying to make the store better than selling stuff on-line. We have a Web site, but it isn’t updated too often. Instead, I spend a few hours every day putting stuff up on eBay because the reality is that only 50 people are going to see what I’ve got in the store, whereas on-line you’ve got like five million potential customers."

In large part, though, Freedman’s commitment to the store is a labor of love. "I can’t carry a tune, but I’ve been collecting records since I was 10 years old. We have regulars who come in to talk about music all the time. And then there are those people who come in here and they’re like, ‘This is like the High Fidelity movie.’ So, I just like having the store. I wouldn’t start one right now. But I like doing it because it’s definitely different from a big chain store."

Planet Records owner John Damroth, who opened his store in 1983 in Kenmore Square before opening a second location in Harvard Square (the original store was destroyed in a fire in 1997 and never reopened), is of the same mind. "When I was a kid, I could walk into a used-record store and buy a record for $3 and it just seemed really cool. I’ve been trying to re-create that experience for other people ever since I opened. But the way people shop has changed over the years. The idea of browsing and spending the time like I used to do, where I’d spend an hour to two looking for stuff, that seems to be something of a lost art. But I haven’t tried to take up as much slack with the Internet as some stores because we still have an active clientele that can support the store. That clientele has been shrinking, but I think that has less to do with downloading than with the fact that people can now get their entertainment from so many different sources."

Like Nuggets, Planet has its own Web site. But Damroth does most of his Internet selling through eBay. And it has become a significant part of his business. "I’m always looking for any source of increased revenue. And on-line is the best way to do that now. I can definitely make up for what I’ve lost in walk-in traffic with the 10 to 20 percent of the business that’s now in on-line sales. The financial side has gotten tougher and tougher, but there’s something about having a shop that still works for me. It helps that we’ve seen an upturn in vinyl sales over the past few years. But my personal model was always to be heavily staffed so that we could constantly be changing the stock and lowering prices on stuff that wasn’t moving. That part has become more difficult. And that’s a trend that probably will continue. Fortunately, the stock is still good because people are still selling us cool stuff. Maybe it’s because people are downloading their discs to iPods and then selling the CDs off."