Borders Emigrates. Here's Our Shot

Billboard reported this week that Borders is all but bailing out of music sales at their retail brick and mortar stores. Though hardly unexpected after their rough go the last few years, Borders has been the sole remaining chain to stock anything close to a broad array of independent music. With Tower gone, Virgin down to six locations, Circuit City gone but never a huge player in indies, Best Buy back to their smaller, major label-focused CD footprint, and Wal-Mart being Wal-Mart, if you live outside of a large city, the chances of finding an indie record at a real store near you are getting thinner and thinner.


Always the optimist , the bright side is that now indies do have an honest shot here, with a chance for being rewarded for solid business practices, sharp marketing and good taste. Gone are the days where the chains saw it profitable to undercut the indies with below market, and frequently below wholesale cost!, loss leader sales. Hopefully gone are the times when labels think that's just an awesome idea to move us some units.

As predicted here three years ago,

And then, finally, when the bean counters with the short memories at Corporate figure out that it's not working for Best Buy, again, they slash their music sections back to a Top 40 and go back to ignoring it.

the gorillas have moved on to a different part of the jungle to beat up on somebody else.

Arise indies

and recapture your glory in our tiny corner patch of the incredible shrinking music biz.

Yes, as we are reminded every minute of every hour of every day for the last nine months, the economy f'ing sucks. But as has been pointed out a million times in the last few years, kids and young-thinking adults still have a voluminous appetite for music. We all just have to continue working on creative ways to get them into stores and indie websites to make the purchase. If you are retailer and have survived through all the additional BS of the last few years, then you have the brains and creativity to take advantage of Borders' misfortune and the pressure that the economy has put on all of the other big guys.

So quit reading and get going already.

Godspeed.