Would you like some music with that?

I used to get really excited about going record shopping. For me, going through racks of CDs and albums, looking for rarities and other record-geek items, was a perfectly passable way to spend a Saturday.

But, more and more, the recording industry is trying to get consumers to think about buying albums in all sorts of places that, well, aren’t record shops. By now, anyone who is addicted to Starbucks coffee has noticed that the coffee chain has CDs for sale at the tills. This holiday season, the Recording Industry Association of America is promoting the fact that KT Tunstall’s iTunes digital album card for the Drastic Fantastic album is available at Starbucks, as are iTunes cards for the Into the Wild soundtrack. In Canada, our own Second Cup chain is looking to compete with Starbucks when it comes to music. The chain has been actively searching for singer-songwriters to play in various locations across Canada—and it has even pitched for artists in the Songwriters Association of Canada website. 
As if coffee shops aren’t enough, labels are now looking to supermarkets. Instead of flipping through gossip rags at the checkout aisles, US Safeway customers can look for digital iTunes cards for Norah Jones’s Not Too Late album.

And Target, another discount big-box chain, has an exclusive deal to sell Taylor Swift’s Christmas album.

I appreciate that the recording industry is trying to find new ways—and places—to market music to the masses, but when CDs and digital download cards end up at checkout aisles, has the industry itself not admitted that music is nothing better than an impulse buy? Is that what the industry envisions as the future of the business? That, instead of record-store visits on lazy Saturdays, we will be enticed by music in the same way we are lured by gum, candy bars and magazines as we wait for the cashier to ring through our groceries? Will we buy albums, only to later forget about them until we find the cards or the CDs when we are transferring cartons of milk to our refrigerators?

In this world, what happens to the people who anticipate the release dates of albums from their favourite bands? Or, the person that brings an entire stack of CDs or records to the cash register, looking forward to a week of listening to new music? I know you people are out there.

It’s just that buying an album as you’re deciding whether or not you want a grande- or venti-sized latte takes all the, well, enjoyment out of record shopping. And, in the end, I think it cheapens the product. V