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| There is something magical about the local record shop. They look shabby and disorganized, worlds away from the shining glitter of the megastores that offers you the security of familiarity, with the uniforms, the big racks, the spacious rooms. Go pass the threshold of the doorway of your local record store, and you’re confronted by a wholly different situation. There’s that slightly moldy smell of the second hand vinyls, the somewhat inadequate lighting that gives the records that certain glow, CD and Vinyl racks that take so much space that the sound of people coming into the room will inevitably lead to a mass reorganizing of standing positions. It’s also more difficult to find your way through the massive amount of music that are stored in the cramped space of a local record store. The time it takes to orientate yourself is usually longer, since there are no fixed rules about where something should stand. Despite all this it’s a place of shelter for the initiated, a place you can lose yourself in, a comforting place, a second home, even.
Sadly, the record shop, your regular record shop around the corner, is a dying breed. All over the world, record shops are disappearing. And this despite the massive amount of music being released each day. Resonanz Schallplatten is one of those shops. It first opened its doors February 2003 in the Auenstraße, almost beside the banks of the Isar river that divides the Bavarian capital of Munich in two. For the next six-and-a-half year it supplied music lovers with an eclectic selection of CDs and Vinyls before moving to the Kapuzinerstraße, where it stayed before it closed down on the 24th of February 2011, on the eight anniversary of the shop. The month before, W Music met up with one of the owner, Markus Rhein, to talk about what happened.
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How did the shop started?
Well, I’m actually from Cologne and was working there as a promoter when I decided to look for opportunities elsewhere. I have a twin brother who has been working at another record shop for a while and we decided to start our own shop with two others. We even went on a record buying trip to the U.S. Then my girlfriend got an offer she just couldn’t refuse here in Munich and since we’ve got a daughter together and because it makes perfect sense financially we moved to Munich. That’s about the same time the record shop in Cologne opened. So I stayed at home and took care of my daughter when I thought that maybe I should open a record shop here as well. So that’s how it all started eight years ago. The record shop in Cologne still exists. It’s very successful and it’s three times as big as this shop. So what happened? Why is Resonanz closing down? We went through all the crisis the record industry went through! When we started CDs was still pretty big. Every time there’s a new band or craze, we sold a lot more of it on CDs than on Vinyls. At some point the CD-Buyers went away. Ever since the beginning we had something of a niche market. But gradually even the bigger companies started to cater to our customers. At the start only the CD buyers but later also vinyls. Two years ago Amazon didn’t want to do vinyls, now they sell them at prices we can’t compete with. The percentage of the vinyls being sold isn’t actually diminishing, the problem is that you often can’t get the stuff because they’re pressing less, and at the same time more people want a share of the cake. Also people have less money these days: if there’s a sale, then many will come. Do you think Mp3s and Downloads play a role? It definitely plays a role, especially concerning the electronic DJs. At first it was the hip-hop heads that went away. Then many who used to buy all those 12” singles to spin started using laptops. It goes without saying that it’s a big customer base that went away there. Apart from that I think that downloading is a bigger problem for CDs. Especially with all the new stuff that’s being released these days.
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