Month: August 2013

We’re due for a little “refocus of the site”. A big part of that is going to pertain to the era in which we want to specialize.

A big part of THAT in the record business happens to be barcodes, a point I’ve wanted to make for a long time.

Barcodes came into general usage in 1974, originally of interest to grocery stores, but they really didn’t hit the record industry until about 1980. We’ve seen one or two from 1979 in our former brick and mortar, and maybe they even reach back a little farther than that. Not ALL records produced from 1980 onward had barcodes, but a bunch of them did.

By 1990 they were reporting to The Industry that records were dead. That had a profound effect on things.

Marketeers are skittish people.

Anyway, let’s say a guy wanted to focus his retailing attention on a span of about ten years. Maybe because he doesn’t feel any more ambitious than that, but maybe he wants to present himself as Some Kind Of Authority.

In the case of yours truly, a great starting point would be 1969. Music was powerful then, bands were discovering how to take control of their projects. The world changed, people landed on The Moon, Bob Dylan landed in Nashville.

That decade would end in 1979 then. That’s really convenient. I’ll tell you why.

Say you’re glancing through a thousand records. I do that sometimes. Say you’re trying to add to your stock. A quick way to do that within our 1969-1979 model would be to flip through the lot looking at their BACKS for the barcodes. Quick way to calculate the percentage of the material we might be interested in.

So, all the barcodes go over “here”, out of the way. Is that to say every barcode is evil? Of course not. For example, yours truly is a Grateful Dead collector and they certainly churned out some stuff in the 80s. In fact you could almost make the point that they churned out some of the ONLY stuff in the 80s.

No, barcodes on records are inherently evil because they produce “data” that is analyzed like data about bolts or plastic dolls. This is not a good thing when you’re peddling art.

The music industry was better off when corporate guys didn’t have data. By 1990, they were buying computers for guys like me so that the computers could call each other on Saturday night and report via barcode data what was going on in The Industry.

They had to call me because my highest volume item was one stick of incense and they didn’t have my self-made number in their database. I might have sold a lot of Guns N Roses, but I sold millions of one sticks of incense.

It took almost no time at all, once this system was in place, to declare that Garth Brooks was the Best Selling Stuff in the world, and mass merchandisers starting just going crazy.

I myself banned Garth Brooks, but that was for his refusal to stop by when he was in town.

Once we had barcodes on music, it was a commodity like socks. What a fortunate turn of events for guys in management, but it started the demise that ironically is going to be my re-entry point into the business.

Weapons Of Mass Distribution, I say.

Now, if I could just think of some snappy slogan that means Before The Barcode. Maybe something Latin. What’s “barcode” in Latin?