A classic song from my growing up years (which will date me, I know) was the song “American Pie” by Don McLean, in which the singer laments “the day the music died”, a reference to the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the “Big Bopper” in a plane crash back in 1959.
The song is full of symbols and references to music both past and present, and I know there were many debates and discussions in English classes and philosophy classes about what it all meant.
A key for many people were the song references, with such lines as when “the quartet practised in the park” (the quartet being the Beatles), or to “Jack Flash” from the Rolling Stones. Anyway, the one line that people seem to remember, other than the chorus, is about the day the music died, and I heard that line quoted (and ironically not attributed by the reporters!) in news stories about the announced closure of HMV stores across Canada by the end of April.
Again, I know this dates me, but I recall the days of Sam the Record Man, and the incredible selection of music you could find there, until they closed their doors several years ago.
With one of the last existing outlets to sell music (and movies, and music-movie related stuff like shirts and mugs and whatever) set to close their doors, this will make for a real vacuum.
The claim was that the prevalence of people getting their music digitally, and watching movies through such services as Netflix or Crave or whoever else, they feel they cannot compete with that anymore.
I, along with dinosaurs everywhere, cry out, “But we still buy CDs and DVDs!”, but alas we are not heard and are ignored, to the detriment of the arts and those who make the art.
While the store chain can claim this, the fact is this will hurt the artists who make music and movies and whatever else, in spite of the assertion that “everybody” buys it on-line or has Netflix.
Like with social media sites such as Facebook, not “everybody” is getting their entertainment that way, and not everybody wants to. But then, it seems everything is pandering to Facebook and Google and whoever, to the detriment of not only artists in the entertainment industry, but the local media in communities across Canada. Services like these do not support businesses or the local arts scene or communities as a whole in any way, but they siphon off a whole lot of money from communities anyway.
As a representative of the local media, we try our best to provide coverage of local artists of every kind, visual or performing, so that local residents can in turn support them and be enlightened and entertained by them. The pending closure of HMV may not seem a local concern necessarily, but like with the crew of the Titanic seeing an approaching chunk of ice in the water, this is only the tip of something much bigger and nastier to come.
