Japan has more old-fashioned music stores than anywhere else (opens in new tab)

A good music store has excellent curation, which is still not a solved problem for online stores. (IMDB's "People who liked this also liked..." has got much worse over time.)

There's also a bunch of sub-culture signalling, which I accept is off-putting to many people. But the fact that at least two reasonably good films were set in record stores means something.

Record stores are doing great where I live in the Netherlands, and I couldn't disagree more that it's not fun to browse a music store. I love spending an afternoon flipping through records; fortunately there are 8-9 of them whose owners haven't decided were useless within an hour and a half of me. Some, like Rush Hour in Amsterdam, really are thriving and often very crowded. That one in particular frequently has DJs and hosts radio shows on occasion.

>> "Unlike a bookstore, it's not fun to "browse" music physically"

I enjoy browsing a music store much more than a book store.

I would be very interested in an article about how people still shop and select music in these stores. Most doujin music artists post cross-fade previews on Soundcloud so you know what you want before going, but I don't think that's true of all genres.

> it's not fun to "browse" music physically

speak for yourself.

The one you should be going to is Music Milennium on East Burnside and 22nd.

Dangerous Minds has a somewhat ranty article going into precisely how the majors destroyed the record business in the late 1990s:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_rise_and_fall_of_towe...

That said, they had some idea what they were doing: they cut the least profitable 25% of their artists and SKUs, dropping unit sales by 4.1%, then blamed "piracy":

http://web.archive.org/web/20030113094231/http://www.azoz.co...