The Social

Earlier this week, The New York Times had a nostalgic little piece about the Princeton Record Exchange, a music store in the eponymous New Jersey college town.

It was, as one might expect, the sort of narrative that could be written about any beloved indie-music haven these days: it's a quirky anachronism in a world that really doesn't need it anymore, but it keeps on trucking.

It was a story that hit close to home for me. I lived in Princeton, which lies roughly halfway between New York and Philadelphia, for roughly 15 years, from preadolescence into my early 20s. For a sizeable chunk of that time, I was a Record Exchange regular. I'd pick through the shelves, hunting for something that looked kind of cool or bugging the staff for recommendations. Plus, it was two blocks away from the ice cream shop where I worked in high school. It was a nice place to blow a paycheck on the way home.

Would I do that now? No. Reading that Times article turned me on to the realization that music stores like the Record Exchange no longer have a place in my life. As a music fan who's eagerly plunged into the Digital Age--I had an iPod back when they were chubby!--this is somewhat of a disconcerting revelation. But I realized something else: I'd gladly fork over that $4.99 for a second-hand Pavement album, but I wouldn't take the CD with me. I'd really just like to keep the store in business.

I wonder if I was part of the last generation of teenagers to consider browsing through record store racks to be an essential pastime. The iTunes Store launched in 2003, when I was 18. Ten years from now, will the whole industry be digital, save for a few holdouts, retired hippies, and former indie-pop boys who don't look so cute, now that they're going bald?

I, for one, can't remember the last time I bought a CD, since my entire music collection is now on a hard drive. I haven't been to the Record Exchange in ages, nor do I poke my head into the scattered record shops that line the streets of the neighborhood where I now live in New York.

Call me a terrible excuse for a music fan, but I don't have any use for it; since I was never a vinyl collector (the story would be very different if I were a DJ), I welcomed the opportunity to free up bookshelf space by getting rid of all those darned CD cases.

But the real reason I don't go back to record stores isn't because I can buy music online, it's because I can discover it there. In my days of frequenting the Princeton Record Exchange, it was the late '90s and early '00s, before I owned a laptop or even a cell phone, when my house still had dial-up AOL. It was also the age of Clear Channel radio domination, rife with pre-bizarro Britney, 'N Sync, and embarrassing excuses for "rock" (who remembers when Fred Durst was cool?)

I didn't live in a city, so I wasn't surrounded by concert venues; I found new music by listening to a few good radio stations (Princeton's indomitable WPRB, as well as a now-defunct indie-rock station from the Jersey Shore that I could get only by taping makeshift antenna wires to my bedroom wall) or poking around the Record Exchange.

Before Last.fm, Hype Machine, and Muxtape, this was how I defined "music discovery." It was a lot more of a gamble. There were more than a few occasions when I picked something up at the Record Exchange just because the album art was cool. Bad idea. Now that I have the ability to preview something on Stereogum, read an appropriately convoluted review on Pitchfork, and stream it on Imeem before opting to plunk down $.99 for it on Amazon MP3, I'm saving money in addition to space.

Last year, a popular independent bookstore in Princeton (another frequent drain on my ice cream store paychecks, back in the day) succumbed to the Amazon juggernaut and shut its doors. Now, I still go to bookstores, namely the droolworthy Strand near Union Square in Manhattan. Most of the time, though, I don't know what I'm looking for--I'm there for the search, not the retail. If I have a specific target, say, if my editor wants me to pick up The Complete Idiot's Guide to Punctuation, I load up Amazon and order away.

"Book discovery" online is eons behind music discovery, perhaps because you can't toss Hemingway and Hardy into an algorithm quite as easily as Hot Chip. But still, my offline-reading experience is migrating increasingly online; I've recently become a fan of Goodreads, and I subscribe to Flavorpill's Boldtype newsletter. Then there's the fact that my addiction to the contents of my Google Reader means I'm already reading fewer books and magazines (sad, I know). It's made me start to wonder, in light of my Record Exchange realization, if one day I'd also feel like supporting a small bookstore, just to keep it alive.

The notion of paying to keep something obsolete in business effectively makes it a museum. And the Times profile of the Princeton Record Exchange, with its quips about comically pretentious staffers and eccentric clientele who drive for hours just to get there, not to mention the decor ("early-dorm room with dorky posters, wood-plank ceiling, gray linoleum and an emaciated gray carpet"), reeks of a This American Life-worthy cultural vignette.

The digital-media revolution is all about efficiency, convenience, and accessibility, none of which apply to small-time music stores, where you have to flip through racks of CDs to find the one you want, only to learn that it's sold out. But is that all bad? Perhaps one day, we'll put that kind of musty inefficiency on a pedestal as a charming relic of the old days, an alternative to the everything-at-your-fingertips world that Larry and Sergey brought us.

And indeed, if I had the cash on hand, I'd support an independent record store for the same reason that some well-heeled philanthropists funnel money into historic-preservation funds for landmarks they'll never see. We don't necessarily need them for ourselves; for one reason or another, we just need to know that they exist.

Social-media site Imeem, which focuses on ad-supported music and video playlists, announced Monday that it has acquired Snocap, the music-licensing company founded by Napster creator Shawn Fanning. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Reports of the acquisition had first surfaced in February.

The deal is all about Snocap's technology, as the company hasn't exactly been healthy recently: over half of its staff was let go last year. But the tools Snocap created, which handle digital music licensing and which power embeddable music-sale stores, appealed to Imeem, which was already using Snocap technology to identify files that users uploaded to its streaming-music service.

"The Snocap team built a great technology platform that will be useful to Imeem as we continue to grow," Imeem founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell said in a statement. "Together we'll build on that work in the coming months, and give labels and independent artists new ways to promote and sell their music through Imeem, MySpace and anywhere on the web."

Imeem acquired music start-up Anywhere.fm, which developed "smart playlist" technology, in January. The privately held company, once a lawsuit target, now has deals in place with all major music labels to stream songs online and provide artists and labels with a cut of the ad revenue.

Social media site Imeem announced Monday that it has purchased Anywhere.fm, a small San Francisco start-up that has created an online music player and Web radio technology. No financial terms were disclosed.

This acquisition is clearly about the technology. Anywhere.fm, founded less than a year ago and funded by Y Combinator, has created software that allows users to upload their MP3 collections to the Web and then stream them through their browsers. This could help out Imeem in the user experience department; the service has been criticized for being somewhat difficult to use. A release from Imeem hinted that the technology will also be applied to its fledgling video-streaming features.

On the flip side, since Imeem has licensing deals with all four major record labels, the acquisition can help Anywhere.fm avert potential copyright issues.

Anywhere.fm's "smart playlist" technology, as well as a recommendation engine and features to match up users with similar music tastes, will also provide Imeem with new features that can help it compete with the likes of Last.fm. Purchased by CBS Interactive last year, Last.fm is arguably the most powerful name in social music sites; earlier this month, it launched an ad-supported streaming music initiative that pushed it further into Imeem's territory.

The National plays the 'Rhapsody Rocks NYC' concert on Monday night at the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

NEW YORK--You've got to hand it to RealNetworks' Rhapsody. The subscription music service is pulling out all the stops to increase its market share--partnering with TiVo, entering a lofty deal with MTV Networks--and even if it hasn't been able to dent Apple's iTunes, Rhapsody hasn't been making itself look stupid in the process.

In fact, if the company's "Rhapsody Rocks NYC" concert here Monday night was any indicator, music aficionados are taking the company seriously.

(Credit: Rhapsody)

Monday night was the eve of this year's CMJ Music Marathon, which runs from Tuesday through Saturday. While the Rhapsody concert wasn't actually affiliated with the festival, the timing was perfect for a company that's trying to reach out to influential music lovers--just about all of them were in New York for CMJ.

The show, held at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, featured the Brooklyn-based indie rock act The National--one of those bands that tends to get extolled by indie guru blogs like Pitchfork Media and Stereogum--with openers American Babies, The Little Ones and Pela.

The Highline, coincidentally, is so close to the New York Googleplex that you could practically see Googlers' colorful lava lamps in the building's fourth-floor windows a block away.

The venue was packed, but the people there weren't the sorts who were looking to be seen, pick up dates or start a fight with some hipsters. It also wasn't a geekfest like the Rhapsody-TiVo party earlier this month; as a tech reporter who doesn't normally cover the music industry, I saw very few familiar faces, and there was no cadre of gossiping gadget bloggers clustered by the bar.

Rather, the people who showed up to Rhapsody's pre-CMJ event were the kinds of fans who would be talking about the "really decent" acoustics of the new venue, introduce you to some guy who'd been a bass player for a dozen years and was now creating a cool new digital-music start-up, or debate the merits of pay-per-song versus subscription-based download business models. (There's a lot you can say about that.)

And while there were undoubtedly plenty of concertgoers who doubted Rhapsody's chances as an iTunes competitor, they would still have to admit that the company is building up some street cred.

Rhapsody has an impressive roster of industry veterans on its executive team, knows how to assemble a lineup of bands that even the average "Pitchfork snob" wouldn't sneer at, and can bring in a fun crowd of people to a show in the process. Even if RealPlayer still sucks, that's saying something.

The music sounded pretty good, too.