Posted 6:10 PM by Gene

I'd guess I've bought CDs from perhaps a dozen shops (brick-and-mortar or Web) that have gone out of business. Music retailing is so afflicted by low margins it's hard to see how anyone can make money except on sheer force of volume, and the big-box chains sell their goods as loss leaders. Now comes word that Footlight.com is closing. I'd just started purchasing from them -- they've had pretty decent sales -- and they were good for the kind of specialty recordings impossible to find elsewhere (and that probably should be): foreign cast albums and soundtracks and vocalists. While my checking account is happy no one else can be at the disappearance of sellers who've given recorded music some semblance of diversity, and each Footlight.com that closes condemns us to a future of pablum, sold out of a box, one way or another.