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Technology And Small Business: Plan 9
Posted by: Necci – Aug 31, 2011
When I was a teenager, my friends and I would take monthly trips to our nearest record store—a mere 40 miles away at the closest mall to where we lived in West Central Pennsylvania. We would pile into my old rusty grey Buick Century, everyone crammed in hip to hip in the back and front seats, and we would roar down the curving farms roads until we hit the highway, headed for Johnstown.
As I pushed the Buick’s pedal to the floorboard, allowing my youthful belief in total immortality to take charge, my best friend would pull out a few of his cassette tape holders, complete with travel straps and zippers, and begin to DJ. With the factory stereo system blasting until the back speakers crackled, teetering on the edge of surrender, he jammed in cassette after cassette, slamming down the fast forward and rewind buttons every few minutes until he landed on the perfect song for that perfect day.
Once we hit the mall parking lot, I’d slam my grey boat into the closest spot, and we’d run to the escalator, joking with excitement as we anticipated getting our hands on the latest releases, spending hours digging through the store’s mediocre stock.
When I first came to Richmond, I was in awe at the music selection that was available at the stores. I discovered genres I never knew existed. Having that music selection available to me definitely impacted my life. Recently, when my best friend came down from Pennsylvania for Record Store Day, we patiently waited in the winding check out line at Plan 9 together, just as we had done in high school. Now an adult with disposable income, his arms bulged with obscure CD’s and odd vinyl. “The perfect day,” he said, making sure to pick up a button at the register to commemorate the experience.
The experience of purchasing music has changed drastically since the days of my first record store outings. Now we have the convenience of sitting at our laptop and never venturing out. Like so many others of my generation, even I have a Pandora account. Hit download for instant satisfaction. What then?
I thought I’d pay a visit to Jim Bland, owner of Plan 9 Music in Carytown, to get his perspective on the effects of technology on the music industry, and his place in it.
Jaime Turko: What brought you into the music industry?
Jim Bland: I used to spend all of my disposable income on music, and I was having difficulty finding a job that I wanted to do, and I ended up working at a record department, then a record store, and never looked back. So I go back even further working in the industry, before my partner and I started Plan 9 30 years ago.
JT: Wow. What type of technological changes did you experience when you first opened 30 years ago? Was the store mainly vinyl then?
JB: When we first opened, people kept bugging us, asking us, “When are you going to get a fax machine?” At that time, a fax was hundreds of dollars, so we held out as long as we could and just called in orders, or wrote them by hand. I remember when we got our first computer and had to learn how to develop a database. From there, we went to using a point of sale system. We started bringing in CD’s at that time. That’s when CD technology started to come along. Our whole CD section would have fit [onto] a couple of shelves, and everything else was vinyl and cassettes.
JT: What trends have you seen in the past three decades with music technology itself?
JB: We saw the start of CD technology, which was a big deal then. At that time, it was still evolving and getting its legs, and some of the first pure digital recordings were good. But as that technology started to pick up steam, everyone was doing digital reissues, once the labels got over the hump of their manufacturing costs and started to make good money. They were cranking out all kinds of stuff, and the quality wasn’t very good,
LPs were way better, because they weren’t applying full technology to that [digitizing] process, but were converting vinyl quickly to digital, just sort of sticking it on a disc. Then, as time went on, the sampling rates were changed, and tweaks were made, and that started to improve the quality of the CDs. And now, over the years, there’s HD discs, and Super Audio discs, and now that the sampling rate is more established, the quality is much better. Now CDs sound very good, but there’s still such a difference compared to the feeling of vinyl. It has such a natural warmth that a CD just can’t really duplicate.
Plus, vinyl is tactile, and there’s the album cover art, it’s just a whole different experience. It’s more collectible. CDs are collectible as well; many are limited releases or not reissued, and that’s what we do here [at the warehouse]. Our guys are posting on websites all day, and that’s how we utilize the technology of the internet to sell the limited releases. We sell a lot of ‘78’s online, and now are shipping all over the world. People either win the auction, or make a direct purchase from the website.
We were in a good spot for so many years. CDs were just rolling out, and people were converting like crazy and bringing us boxes and boxes of vinyl, and we could still sell vinyl quite well. That change in CD technology allowed us to ride that wave for quite a long time. Eventually, there was no new format that was tangible. The new format was a download. I could say we’re fighting the change in technology, but it’s just business. Business changes.
JT: How are your sales trending now? Do you have more of an online selling presence, or is it still mainly face to face at the brick and mortar store?
JB: We’ve lost quite a lot of the face to face in the store over the years, and it has accelerated more quickly over the past 5 years. Our online sales have grown quite a bit as we have been able to use the web, but we are still brick and mortar based. Due to the way people consume music, we’ve lost a lot of sales and had to close our other store locations.
Having a music store is not like the other retail stores—you can’t download a stuffed animal or a pair of shoes, you have to go to the store. But you can download music for your phone or ipod, so we’re seeing a generation of kids who have never purchased a record, or music in any physical form. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about this new audience.
But then there’s the audience who may have grown up on vinyl in their teen years, or maybe their twenties. This audience is reverting back to vinyl due to the novelty of it—the size, the collectability, the sharing of the whole vinyl experience. They choose to listen to vinyl versus a download. When you compare that to an mp3, you hear a difference there, because the mp3 is such a lightweight, compressed recording.
JT: Downloading really takes away the face to face interaction of leaving your own house to go somewhere and shop.
JB: It’s almost like an introverted act—you sit there with your headphones on and chat about what you find online with other people online. Yes, it’s a legitimate way of discovery, but, it takes out the in-store expertise. I really miss the face to face experience—there were so many musical friends of mine that I knew exactly what they liked, we would see each other at concerts and share our excitement for who was coming into town or what album to pick up.
JT: Do you think the change in music technology is just based on convenience, or mainly cost?
JB: Portability is definitely a factor, but cost is huge. When Napster came along, music became free. Everybody was basically stealing from the artists. Now there are a lot of artists who choose to put music out there for free in order to grow, and that’s fine. It gives listeners a taste, which is no different from the samples that were available in the earlier years. But when some of these file-sharing sites came along and offered music for free, a lot of people didn’t seem to care about taking the music.
Once the same started happening for movies and games as well, these sites began to get a lot of attention from a lot of big players in the entertainment field who were losing money, and things began to change. But some of those sites are like a gum machine. What’s the top candy? You’re not going to find some weird piece of candy in there, just the mainstream stuff to download.
JT: Do you think the audience is starting to revert back to respecting the creative copyright more? Or did the Napster trend change that indefinitely?
JB: I don’t know that there’s been much of a change in the understanding of artists’ creative copyright, but I do feel that the turning of the tide happened when better sites began to offer better quality content at a price. Now these sites have lowered their prices, so it’s much more affordable than what it once was. If it’s just the content that you want, it’s a comparison for most people.
On one hand, we have customers who will readily snap up used CDs. Some of them will buy a CD, rip it themselves, and sell it back, which puts it back in the stream of commerce. But it’s very double-edged for us.
So, a store like us has the opportunity to carry the used music and movies that you wouldn’t find everywhere else, to give them their second life. [Some] people want to buy it to keep, but others just buy it almost as a virtual rental. It’s cost-effective, and they have the choice to flip it back to us if they want to. And just like movies, there are a lot of limited or Criterion-style releases with the great packaging and content, and a really nice quality product that is very collectible that we offer.
JT: How to you see the percentage sales change from Plan 9 starting as a brick and mortar to now having an online sales component?
JB: Our sales are still mainly brick and mortar, because there’s huge competition online. We may have a few sales online that bring in a large amount of money from something very collectible, then have another month with very low sales.
Currently we’re at our fourth location in Carytown. We’ve moved around, grown, and now we need to downsize. We definitely have to find a smaller space. We had another location, on the same side of the street, where Roadrunner is now. We were there for about 12 years. Here we have the stage and the basement, and we really had the ability to expand in this current space.
JT: What will you change once you downsize? Where will you go?
JB: I don’t see us phasing out anything that we have, we just don’t need as much space as we have now. We will be crammed in there, but a smaller space will let us live for a little while longer, where the cost of operation is more commensurate with our sales in the store, and the space is easier to monitor.
Carytown is a great retail area, and we would hate to leave the area. Right now we’re weighing our costs, the percentage of destination versus casual shopping. We just have to balance those components out. We will be in the same location for the remaining year on our lease.
JT: Many people that I have come across have reminisced on how Plan 9 used to do shows. Can you share a little about that?
JB: We used to do a lot of shows in the local clubs--punk shows, all kind of shows. On one of our anniversary years, we would bring in various groups—jazz, rock, salsa--and it was a lot of fun.
We are still reactive to the bands coming in town, through making connections through the labels, as well as Record Store Day. We work to stay on top of who is in town, and who can come into the store to do a local signing, or maybe play acoustically, as well as working with the local artists.
Usually during Record Store Day and the Watermelon Festival, we plan in-store events, but besides that it’s random, due to local, national, or new artists’ availability to come in to the store, which is definitely fun. Many artists that started local, who know their fan base, will approach the indie stores for events, as will new artists who approach the indie stores and utilize social networking to get their name out there.
Wherever we go, we do plan to keep doing events, even if we have to pull in a stage to do events. We did that years ago, and we’re hoping that we can do that again once we move into a smaller space.
JT: How do you see your business changing in the next 2-3 years?
JB: We definitely will have a smaller retail space, we just need to find the right brick and mortar space so that we can continue both our online component and retail component. If we find a place with a basement, we may utilize that area for our offices and storage facility—it just all depends on what’s available at the time when we’re ready to move for the right price.
Sales are up slightly, according to the national charts, which of course, include downloads. Physical sales are up right now with vinyl, but they’re down on the CD side. Prices are lowering, and people who were on the fence with purchasing online are now going to the sites they trust the most. Our website sells downloads as well, although we don’t sell many downloads, because that’s not what people know us for. For instance, we had a customer the other day that bought some Muddy Waters and some other blues music, then he downloaded an Allman Brothers title. It’s definitely there for customers who want it, to make several purchases all on the same site, in the same shopping cart.
JT: What’s the all-time best selling release that the store has had?
JB: Dave Matthews was definitely the top seller when they hit the scene, definitely the first 3 or 4 albums—we were ordering them by the thousands. Because they’re local, the store that we had in Charlottesville as well as the store here in Richmond would have release parties, and we would have huge sales. We’ve never seen anything like that since. Now we’re ordering them by the hundreds, due to more of the band sites having the ability for the customer to download the music directly.
There are many perennials, from the Beatles to U2, and those still sell. The Beatles have been amazing in that regard—there’s so much attention to giving the customer the highest quality sound that they can get.
JT: I remember, as a kid growing up in west central PA, we would pile into the car to go to the record store almost an hour away, and it was the big event. We always traded and lended music, and it was exciting—
JB: (laughs) Or you would make a mix tape, which the labels tried to fight a bit back then. But we always saw the mix tape as more of a tribute; if you were a fan and wanted to record a live show for a friend, it didn’t really interfere with commerce too much. It was more about being a fan, and when you shared it with a friend, the curiosity really drove people to go buy the album because they really liked a song they heard on the tape.
Now people do that with burning a mix disc for a party. A lot of the DJ’s even jockey mp3 files now.
JT: I’ve noticed a lot of younger people who grew up in the CD generation are now trending back to vinyl. Where you and I grew up with vinyl, they never experienced it and seem curious.
JB: My son is 14, is always online looking at all kids of music, and when I tell him about something, he’ll bring it up online. The internet is a great tool for the discovery of music. He’s fascinated by vinyl as well. [For] lots of kids, digging through their parents’ record collections is a very cheap way of entry of experimenting with music.
Almost all of the new releases now have a vinyl component, with a download card, or a CD card, where you can get the whole package. It’s interesting to see that bands are bringing more vinyl to sell to shows now.
JT: How do you feel that social networking, such as Facebook, has affected your business?
JB: Although we’ve lost a lot of sales overall, we can easily communicate with our customer base through Facebook and Twitter now to send out news on new releases, or when we’re giving some tickets away. It’s made communication with our customers much easier. We do send a weekly email as well, with weekly release news. But customers respond well to Facebook, as it’s not in your face as much, and some customers resist giving out their email address.
We definitely use Facebook for tickets and show promotions regularly, as well as the new releases, or lithographs that we may be giving away, or an extra EP. It’s a way of getting that information to our customers instantly to have them come into the store for the promotion, like a spontaneous ticket giveaway.
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plan9music.com
facebook.com/plan9music
By Jaime Turko
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