The BeBop sign still hangs prominently over the space in Maywood Mart off of I-55 in Jackson, Mississippi. Through the vacant windows sit the empty shelves that once held the sounds of generations. For decades, since the inception of rock n roll, the record shop was the local hang out for music aficionados. As social networking became digital and records became computer files, fewer and fewer shadows graced the doorsteps of the record shop. The industry as a whole watched its sales figures plummet into the distance. Bebop Record Shop was once the largest record store chain in the state of Mississippi, but it has now gone the way of Virgin Record Stores and Tower Records before that. The last BeBop location closed in April of this year. 

    “Our sales pretty much peaked around 1999 and 2000. We had 8 stores at that time and were still growing, but along came CD burners and the penetration of the internet into house holds,” says Drake Elder, Co-Owner of BeBop Record Shop, “From there we saw a 15-20% declines in business each year in the early part of the 2000’s and since.” 

    Elder says that by 2005, his sales at BeBop had leveled out and they enjoyed a steady clientele that continued to buy CD’s. His sales were bolstered by Gospel and the Blues, two genres, Elder supposes, are supported by a less technologically established demographic. Elder notes by this time the younger shoppers tended to buy digitally from the Internet, if at all. As the double-digit sales declines continued, the Bebop franchise began to shed more stores in an attempt to keep ahead of the losses. When the economy turned down again in 2008, losses increased causing Elder and his business partner Kathy Morrison to retain only two locations statewide by 2009, both in Jackson. 

   “When money’s tight, a lot of people who might not have been inclined to burn a CD or download it off the Internet will,” says Elder.  

    Elder points to several factors, among them Hurricane Katrina, the downturned economy, and spiking gas prices, that helped BeBop along the way from 8 stores to 0 in the span of 10 years. However, the permeation of digital over that time period was a major factor. 

    The digital revolution played a large part in the shift the music industry has seen over the last decade. Drake Elder’s trends at BeBop are a microcosmic example of industry wide sales trends since the launch of Napster, the first prominent peer-to-peer file sharing network, and the iPod, both in 2001. Other services have since stepped in to fill Napster’s shoes, each version further decentralizing the peer-to-peer network in order to make downloads harder to track. Now, peer-to-peer file sharing through systems such as bit torrent are commonplace, leaving the recording industry with millions of dollars on the table every year. Although its easy for consumers to find music free, the sales of digital tracks and albums are still gaining ground in an industry that has seen sales decline every year since 1999. The numbers for 2010 are no better. According to Nielson Soundscan, the record industry lost 2.4% on sales of 1.507 billion units in 2010 versus 1.545 billion in 2009 with total album sales slipping to 326.2 million units, a 12.7% decline over sales of units in 373.9 million in 2009. Digital sales, however, continued to climb, on the back of 86.3 million digital albums sold, gaining 13% over 2009 figures of 76.4 million albums. 

    The music industry’s shift from physical to digital has effected every aspect of the business, from the record stores, the musicians and the recording studio’s themselves. Danny White, owner of 16 Ton Studio in Nashville, TN has kept his studio on Music Row ahead of the changing tide. 

   “We went from a mechanical type of sale where a person walks into a store and buys a compact disc to people getting on the Internet and downloading this stuff. That’s the wave of the future and we’re all trying to position ourselves to be on that train and move forward,” says White. 

    Having spent 7 years as a recording studio on Music Row, White has seen the industry’s shift first hand. “2007, 8 and 9 were not good, but 2010 was really good. I think that’s a testament to what we do here at the facility and what we deliver to our clients,” White says. 

    The process of developing technology is changing the way musicians, and those industries that support them, are looking at the music business. The advent of social networking and advancements in technology are allowing musicians to record at home, distribute themselves regionally, and promote themselves through homemade websites. Technology is making equipment cheaper and is giving greater access to musicians who would otherwise find the music business cost prohibitive. 

   “In the modern recording industry world, the barrier to entry is much lower financially and otherwise,” says Jackson based artist Scott Albert Johnson. This lowered barrier creates a greater number of artists who in turn create hundreds of niches that cater to certain audiences. The current scope and breadth of the music industry is quickly becoming too much for a physical store to hold. Only digital space can provide what the current appetites demand. 

   “I don’t think you are going to see a lot of King Canaries, I think you’re going to see a lot of Prince Canaries flying around who find a way to find their niche as digital download moguls and find a way to carve out a business. And I’m not sure I have a problem with that,” says Johnson.

    Sales continue to decline, even as the number of artists increases. Now knowing them all or listening to them all is impossible for anyone. Many artists distribute themselves, remain unsigned and are happy with it. There are fewer and fewer big acts that get the attention of the record industry at large. With so much music out there, the record industry should be booming. The most obvious place to lose money is in the ocean of peer-to-peer file sharing that is permeating a resistant industry The second place these sales could be going is into the pockets of the musicians directly. Again, with advancements in technology, artists are able to record albums themselves, market, and distribute the albums with sales going directly into their pockets. 

    BeBop Records in Jackson is only the latest victim of a rapid change to digital. All over the industry, the cogs linked into the machine have to break their paradigms and adapt to the new way of doing business. The industry can capitalize on the new ideas and technologies, embrace them, and decide how to monetize them or quickly find their pockets as empty as the shelves at BeBop Records. 

    As the demise of the traditional record store breaks the horizon, a consensus is being reached among industry insiders that only the niche stores will survive. 

   “The only thing that’s going to be left for record stores, are niche stores that carry vinyl and hard to find things and market themselves as an eccentric adjunct,” says Johnson, 

   “There might be a place for that. Maybe.” Elder agrees. “There will be a niche, I’m hoping that people will get tired of just having a digital file. With a CD or Vinyl, you have something to collect. A digital file isn’t really worth anything to anyone but you.”

    The numbers support these sentiments, among the rapid decline in physical sales, the sales of vinyl are up by a whopping 14% in 2010, having sold 2.8 million units, 3 million more than 2009. So perhaps all is not lost for the physical album, as consumers gravitate to collectibles and retro analog sound. 

    No one knows what the recording industry will look like in 2021, as technology continues to advance and more artists continue to show up on the scene. The physical record store will have to adapt or the world will continue to see large stores like BeBop be unable to sustain themselves. What niche will the record stores fall into? That remains to be seen, but the old model is broken. As the Bebop stores sit empty, cold-faced monuments to a rapidly changing system that left them behind, they are a reminder that in the 21st century nothing is sacred and everything is new.