Is the Record Store Dead?

"[The] Virgin Megastore at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan, apparently the single highest-volume music store in all of America, is closing in less than a month. In fact, all six remaining U.S. Virgin branches are being shuttered this spring, leaving more than 1,000 people jobless and leaving New York City without a major record store. It's not just the chains and the big names that are suffering. Some genre-specialist outlets are hanging in there, but generally speaking the independent record store is also teetering on the brink of extinction. It's the same story from big cities like New York and Los Angeles to college towns across the country.

Virgin Megastores in the U.S. is being dissolved because its current owners...believe they can make a lot more money from the property that the Megastores occupy than from CD sales.

The only area of record retail that seems to be doing OK, even prospering, is used vinyl, especially the high-end, boutique sector catering to collectors willing to pay good money and who are still addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the random discoveries that you don't get from eBay or Gemm. But that only serves to reinforce the grim truth: The future of the record store lies in music's past."