Music retail in Canada, 1996-2016, vs. music retail in the US

I was about to post in the Best Buy thread but it really seems as if my specifically Canadian frame of reference makes my observations about this period in music retail history irrelevant. Here is a small collection of observations (or propositions, let's call them) about the Canadian music retail business that I take for granted. Thoughts? Am I right to believe these things?

* It seems to me that music retail hit a serious decline in Canada sooner than it did in the US. A large majority of the music stores that existed in in the '90s -- mostly in malls -- had closed by 2002. Partly this was due to management problems with what were the major music chains -- Sam's, Sunrise, and Music World in particular. And partly it seems to be because of faster adoption of broadband internet.

* Canada seems to have dumped tapes somewhat earlier than the US. Most music stores I frequented had cut down their tape selection drastically by 1998 and abandoned them entirely by 2000, whereas when I spent time in the US in 2004 tapes were still available in significant numbers in places like Wal-Mart (although they were deeply discounted). 1997 seems to be the last time Canadian music retailers got tape copies of all new releases.

* Places like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City (and of course Target, which came and went in 2014-15) seem not to have been major players in the music retail business here, at least not to the extent they were in the US. Partly this is because they arrived too late, and partly this is because mall department stores like Eaton's and The Bay were already established as music retailers (although they abandoned music sales in the late '90s).

* Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and the like didn't really kill off the mall music chain -- they were already dying out when Best Buy arrived. Although in 1998 any decent-sized mall would have at least an HMV and a Music World (plus, sometimes, a Sam's or a Sunrise), by 2002 most malls had just the HMV -- almost all of the chain stores had closed by then. (Besides HMV, Sunrise survived the longest, subsidized by its parent company which also owned Jean Machine.)

* "Big box" electronics stores like Future Shop didn't seem to exert the price pressure on new releases that Best Buy did in the US. Leaving aside some loss leaders, I recall new releases cost roughly the same there as they did at HMV, Music World, or anywhere else. When Best Buy arrived, it did exert some pressure, but prices were already falling.

* Borders-type big-box bookstores tried but (unlike in the US?) failed to be significant players in music retail. These stores -- Indigo, Chapters, and smaller chains on the prairies -- arrived in the late '90s with big music sections but had largely abandoned their music sections by the time I got to university in 2002.

Any other observations about cultural and economic differences in music retail between these two geographic neighbors?

 

I would concur with your observations. The big box outlets didn't have the influence that they did south of the border in the demise of record stores. Downloading did.

 

I will say that, having grown up only 4 hours from Montreal, my family used to go up there a LOT in the early to mid 1990s through to 2000 when the Canadian dollar was dirt cheap...I'd bet a full 1/3 of my 1100+ CDs were bought up in Canada. We used to come back from trips with armfuls of CDs, and it was great because a lot of the UK and European imports I couldn't find in the US (or only find for big $$) were readily available and dirt cheap in Canada.

 

I don't believe that `cassette singles' were ever even sold up here in Canada. OP, nice post.

 

The USA has a lot more cities, and therefore more places with dense population that could sustain independent record stores.

I was a big fan of going down to Yonge Street in Toronto back in the 80s and early 90s when all the stores where south of Bloor,
and you could hit 5 or 6 stores easily to compare prices and selection. There aren't many places in Canada where that ever happened.
While the USA is also very suburban, and most people likely got their CD's at the mall... the best cities still had more cool places
to shop than most of Canada ever did.

 

My Canadian record shopping history is limited to the A&B Sound in Victoria in the mid-1990s. What a great shop.

 

CDs for the Canadian market also tended to be manufactured in Canada (by CINRAM) and with Canada-specific packaging (remember the Oasis album that featured "Digsy's Diner"?) rather than imported from the US, which led to a basically independent pricing structure related to the (then weak) Canadian dollar.

And, of course, Canadian content regulations on radio and television ensured that store shelves were chock full of Canadian recording artists on Canadian arms of the major labels -- these had scant US distribution by comparison.

Yes, the cassette market in Canada seems to have been a good deal less robust than it was in the US. I wonder if it's because Walkmans and car tape players didn't perform well in the cold?

 

In the early-mid 2000s, CD space in shops took a gigantic drop. What used to be a whole CD section in Wal Mart shrunk to an aisle almost overnight, and HMV was continuously shifting from a music store to an "entertainment" store, where DVDs and pop culture memorabilia took up most of the floor space. The places like CD Plus that never really did anything well in the first place didn't even seem like they tried to fight to save their business.

I agree that the big box stores didn't really matter much, usually because they were out of walking distance in most cities, and were more adult-oriented than teenager downtown/mall type places. The prices at Best Buy/Futureshop etc were never really any better than HMV, and certainly not better than the free files available on the internet...

The book Appetite For Self Destruction has a great section listing the reasons the record industry fell apart. While the availability of file sharing is definitely the key component, there were so many reasons that everyone my age had zero problems downloading instead of shopping. Look at what was popular in the late 90s/early 2000s... who on earth wanted to spend $20 on a whole Lou Bega album to hear that one silly song?

 

I bought a Blue Rodeo and a Prince one here. I don't remember seeing a plethora of them though.

 

Out west (Greater Vancouver Regional District to be exact for this example) we had A&B Sound. They did exert pressure on the price of music. CDs were cheap ($11 or $12 dollars) compared to what I was reading about elsewhere. Future Shop had to match their prices to compete whilst HMV didn't and largely disappeared. Funnily enough the two former chains are now gone and the latter is the only game in town with pretty decent prices.

There was one Sam the Record Man out here and it was next door to A&B Sound. The prices there were always a few dollars more but not as expensive as HMV.

 

I remember having the HMV club card, and shopping regularly at Sam the Record Man- then shifting pretty much to Amazon.
Sam went bankrupt in 2001, closed a bunch of stores and reorganized, but by 2007 it was done.
It's a shame it didn't last longer, since it wasn't too much after that the vinyl resurgence started again.
I was buying vinyl quite frequently from Acoustic Sounds starting when i found them in 2008.

 

Before the later club card HMV had one of those buy 10 cds and get one free loyalty cards that they stamped with every purchase. I was pulling a scam for awhile. I'd buy a bunch of cds and get my card stamped. I'd keep the cds sealed and return them to another shop for an exchange. I'd then pretend I didn't know about the loyalty card scheme before seeing it in store there and then so I'd get some more stamps. Eventually HMV realised that what they need to do is not only stamp the card but also the receipt, which is exactly what they did

If you couldn't find a cd within the, I think $25 limit, you could use it as credit towards a more expensive cd. I got a lot of cds with that loyalty card. I was buying so many cds at the time. This would be late 80's/early 90's era.

After HMV showed up I hardly went into Sam's. It was HMV and the Record Peddler for cds and this other shop for lp. I was mainly buying UK import stuff and Sam's never seemed to have much of it, especially electronic stuff. They had a pretty good selection of other stuff IIRC. Especially the jazz/blues section. That was pretty big and, again IIRC, the staff were quite knowledgeable.

 

Same here, I had a few - "Love Is Strong" by the Stones, for instance - but I never saw a lot of them in Toronto.

 

I still have lots of Canadian cassingles!

 

The strange part is that Superstore seems to stock more CDs than some of the smaller Walmarts. I'm not sure if these decisions are made on a regional basis, but I really miss the HMV and Sam Goody locations which are no longer with us.

 

I thought Future Shop had a major impact. In Ottawa circa 1994 or so, HMV was strong, but the others (Sam's, Music World, A&A) were dead or dying with CDs priced 18.99-24.99. There was a music store on Laurier that won 'Canada's best independent music store' that was setting the pace. Used CDs were $10.99 and had a trade-in value of $9. That allowed me to sample so much music... if I didn't like it, it cost me $2! All new CDs were $12.88 for the first week of release. Their new release board was an inspiration.

When Future Shop came in, they copied the loss leader new release strategy. My beloved record store closed up shop when their lease ran out because they couldn't compete... one owner started a niche record shop and the other opened a restaurant (with a small CD shop in the corner). Future Shop's arrival was the beginning of the end. ‎

 

Small town Canada had little in the way of chain stores for me growing up in the 80's and early 90's. You bought music in a section of a department store, pharmacy or grocery store. Mail order and Columbia House was how I got the majority of my music until I moved to Calgary.

I don't ever go shopping for music in small towns anymore, so I have no idea if those same establishments are still hocking music, but for most of the expanse of our country, you can hardly blame people for just downloading stuff when you can't even find a physical copy to buy if you wanted to.

Calgary had a good run of stores in the 90's, A&B Sound being the best selection and prices. Also a chain of "previously enjoyed" CDs were sold at Tramps (not sure if they were in other cities). Now it's just a few HMVs and the independent stores which focus on vinyl and independent music.

I still buy the majority of my stuff via the Internet, as what I like is always in short supply, but I do a lot of browsing here in town.

I have never (and will never) buy a cd from Walmart, and by the time Best Buy and Future Shop started selling music, I had long grew past the mainstream selection of pop and country they offered.

 

1994 seems early to me to call Sam's and Music World "dead or dying" -- those were salad days for those companies, with the mall stores flourishing and new ones opening up -- although I do remember the $18.99-$24.99 (and even $26.99) pricing! Perhaps things were different in Ottawa than in Toronto. A&A was before my time. I was unaware of their existence until they had been gone for years.

You make a good point -- as I noted in the OP, outside of city centers, HMVs in suburban malls seem to be the last outpost of music retail in Canada. I have to assume that in smaller towns without malls of significant size that there is no music retail at all. The department stores (i.e. Sears and the Bay) got out of that business years ago, and it's been a couple of years since the last time I saw a new CD release in a pharmacy.

I don't spend a lot of time in what you'd call small towns although there is a surprisingly large independent CD/DVD store just outside the city center in Stratford. I wonder how common such establishments are.

 

I grew up in Halifax. I was buying cassettes and cassette singles in the Sam the Record Man on Barrington Street. Bought my first CD in 1993 and didn't look back. I remember HMV opening on Spring Garden Road in 1997 and it was a big deal. Lined up on opening day.

Personally I didn't see any lag in CD sales until the whole Napster effect a few years after around 2000.

 

On each annual trip I make to Toronto ON, the Music "footprint" of the Yonge Superstore downtown seems to be getting smaller and smaller, giving up valuable floor real estate to other forms of entertainment media.

 

Even when my friends laughed at me for buying CD's and going on and on about Napster, I never stopped buying CD's. Napster never appealed to me, and could never replace buying the real thing.

Here in Montreal we had Discus, Sam The Record Man and my personal favourite, Rock En Stock! That's where I'd find all the imports on vinyl and cassette. I remember buying Appetite For Destruction on cassette on import before it came out in Canada and bringing it to school. Nobody was impressed at first, but once they became big and Sweet Child broke, then they all jumped on board.

Another spot was a place called "Mars", on St-Catherine street. I used to find all the cool import 12" singles for Maiden and Metallica there. I'd spend hours in there going through their bootlegs, posters, magazines and vinyl. The place was a dump, but if you put in the time, you'd find a hidden treasure.

 

The best record stores are west of Yonge: Sonic Boom, on Spadina just north of Queen is the biggest in the city and has a monstrous vinyl section and a lot of cds, new and used. They're pretty cheap, too. Then there's Kops, which is just vinyl, on Queen just west of University, Rotate This (mostly vinyl) on Ossington south of Dundas, and Soundscapes, which probably has the best selection of CDs. They also have a good vinyl selection. And it's a really nice store. Those are just a few that are all a lot better than HMV, and have better prices. They're in nicer parts of the city, too.

A nice day out would be hitting Sonic Boom, walking over to Soundscapes, and then going for dinner/drinks in Little Italy (where Soundscapes is).

 

Indeed, once upon a time up here we had lots of options for retail record store chains: HMV (formerly Mister Sound), Music World, Sam The Record Man, A & A, A & B Sound...all gone now except for HMV and from what I've seen/read HMV is sorta an endangered species now.

 

I like Soundscapes, but if it has "the best selection of CDs" then things must be pretty bad; they're a small store and their stock is a fraction of what it used to be (judging by visits in 2010 and 2015). There's a very good classical/jazz store in the Yorkville area called Grigorian, IMO the best CD store in the city although not for pop/rock fans. Quite a huge stock although the store shrank by about 40% a year or so ago and they have no stockroom as far as I know.

 

I have been to that HMV location several times since 1997. For year, it had a great selection of imports and catalog titles compared to the stores in Sydney. By 2005, I noticed that the selection was narrowing with deep catalog items slowly being overtaken by compilations.