After years of service to State College's music scene, City Lights Records store owner Greg Gabbard said he is wary of the year to come.
"It won't be here this time next year," owner Greg Gabbard said of the store located at 316 E. College Ave. "In a town this size there aren't enough people to support a brick-and-mortar music store anymore. It's not a promise. It's just a prediction."
In February, Gabbard said it was the music-downloading trend that was to blame for the decline in business. He said that same trend has continued to plague his business since, adding increasing decline in album sales and the reliance on the Internet for new music may negatively affect the record store.
"We are hanging on here," he said. "Call it hanging on as opposed to thriving. I love it. I'll do it for as long as I can."
This trend is not just an issue in State College. According to the Virgin Megastore Web site, the CD giant has closed its flagship location in Times Square effective Monday.
There were 428.4 million albums sold nationwide in 2008, down from 500.5 million in 2007, according to Nielson Sound Scan. As for digital music, 844.2 million tracks sold in 2007, and in 2008 that increased to almost 1.1 billion.
Meanwhile, 65.8 percent of the 428.4 million albums sold in 2008, were purchased digitally, according to Nielson Sound Scan.
Local promoter Jesse Ruegg, who coordinates the Roustabout! concert series, said the demise of the album is connected to the recording industry's strategy in the '80s and '90s.
The art form of the album was abused as the industry "padded out" an artist, Ruegg said. The industry produced albums of 12 to 15 songs with mediocre songwriting, forcing consumers to pay "18 bucks to find a few good tracks," Ruegg said.
Ruegg added he feels like the industry's strategy has led some consumers to turn to the mass pirating of music as a form of revolt.
"We had crap shoved down our throats with bands like Limp Bizkit," Ruegg said. "The industry was shoving it down 14-, 15-, 16-year-old throats, the impressionable youth who aren't discerning music listeners yet. People are fed up with being told to buy crap, and I think this led to the decline of the album as a whole."
A press release published earlier this month by The NPD Group -- the leader in market research for the entertainment industry -- reported there were nearly 17 million fewer CD buyers in 2008 than in 2007, in contrast to an increase in over 8 million Web users purchasing music.
According to the NPD, consumers seemed to cite preferring digital downloads over CDs because they could choose, purchase and listen on an expedited level.
There's a hole where a portion of our culture used to exist, Gabbard said -- a shift fueled by the decline in record sales and consumers choosing single tracks over full albums.
"Now they just turn on their computer and look on Pitchfork or MySpace and believe the hype," he said. "It's like buying chapters of a novel rather than the whole book."
Matt Whittle, the frontman of local band Matthew and the Judes, said he's torn. As an artist, he understands digital music is cheaper to produce; as a consumer, he doesn't want the physical product to disappear.
"I love buying CDs. They sound better," Whittle (senior-English) said. "They were meant to be heard in that order, with those dynamics, with that amount of space between tracks."
Musicians have to accept that regardless of their artistic vision, people are going to consume music however they want, Ruegg said.
But all the doom and gloom may produce results for independent musicians, Ruegg said -- artists on smaller labels such as Merge Records now have a chance to shine.
"For a long time huge labels put a whole bunch of money behind a bunch of artists hoping to find success," Ruegg said. "It's the same concept of throwing a bunch of things at the wall and hoping one sticks."
After graduating from Penn State and signing a record deal with hip-hop group The Spooks (who went on to sell gold records throughout Europe), Chenjerai Kumanyika has returned as a graduate student in entertainment and media studies.
"This isn't the first time the entertainment industry has had to change mediums," Kumanyika said. "This is a time when listeners have more freedom to discern what's good rather than have the music industry tell them what's good."
Local singer-songwriter T.J. Cornwall said he feels the change in the industry is exciting and scary all at the same time.
"It's a really exciting time to be starting up as a musician," he said. "You have to change with the music industry to survive. It does annoy me when people listen to singles here and there, but musicians have to take it with a grain of salt."
And the industry needed to be shaken up a bit, Ruegg said.
"Artists need to find different revenue streams," he said. "Personally, it needed to happen."
This shouldn't be a time when people read the headlines and see the fall of the music industry, Kumanyika said -- something positive can come from this.
"This is a time that has the potential to empower artists," he said. "Artists should try to use that power, and fans should recognize this as a time to choose."
