archGFX

i voted in the PLUG awards. you know what annoyed me most? no, not the fact that i had to vote in every single category, despite the only female artist i recognized being annie, who a) i hate b) is not in the least indie rock. nor is it that when i didn't fill in my company and title, my vote returned an error, which cleared all of my votes, forcing me to re-enter them all.

no, it's the vote about record stores. no one can acurately vote in that category. i live in chicago, and i used to live a few blocks from dusty groove america. so naturally i had to vote for it, despite having never been to any of the other stores. similarly, no one living in atlanta will have had the opportunity to visit any store other than criminal records.
so it's an unanswerable question for most people. but that's not what irks me. what irks me is that the store i wanted to vote for isn't even on the list.

"We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

-former amazon employee
now that's independent! The RIAA has long propped up independent record stores as the martyrs of file-sharing. and with good reason. independent records stores NEED the distribution channels that the RIAA provides. that bottleneck has, for the past half century, wrought the desolation in creativity displayed by major labels. if you really value independent music, the independent record store is not the agent of change you need to look to.