The Public and the Public Sphere in the Record Store:

             “Should a tangible, physical product matter that much, or is it all nostalgia? …Will social networks survive without a physical place like a record store for like-minded people to interact?”

             Ian’s question led me to think about record stores and music products in relation to Jürgen Habermas’ idea of the “public sphere” and Michael Warner’s concept of the “public.”

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas defines the “public sphere” as the space where “private people come together as a public” and practice “public use of their reason” (27). In other words, the public sphere is where people transcend their private concerns and constitute the public together to exert their reason to discuss issues beyond their immediate interests. Although the public sphere itself is less a concrete place than an abstract notion, just like its counterpart, the “private sphere,” it presupposes physical public spaces in which such interaction can occur. For example, Habermas regards salons, coffee houses, and table societies in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as the embryo of the public sphere.

Can record stores be considered as public spaces where the public sphere manifests itself? The majority of quotes from articles and interviews in this paper seem to suggest that record stores has indeed functioned in such a way till the recent crisis. Comparing record store to a “clubhouse for teenagers,” emphasizing on “the sense of community,” and describing the activities in record stores as “[having] conversations with people you’re shopping with” and “hanging out with like-minded people” rather than consuming products encourage us to view record stores as the location of the public sphere. Then closing down of record stores has crucial cultural and political significance: it is an example of “colonization” of the public sphere by economic system that Habermas predicted. It is, in a sense, “the end of the world.”

An alternative way to look at the same phenomenon is to focus on music products and its buyers instead of stores. In Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner shifts the center from the public sphere to the “public” constituted around texts. What constitutes the “public,” in his argument, is neither physical place nor abstract “sphere” but “texts and their circulation” (66). In this sense, the disappearance of record stores does not mean much as long as music is still consumed and circulated. Shopping online and sharing files create and maintain the public as effectively as going to record shops and having interaction with other customers. However, the characteristics of the public would be inevitably different, due to the difference in the mode of circulation. Steve Jones’ words seem to point to this direction.

There are remaining questions: what impacts the changes in business and mode of circulation has had on the contents of popular music? What changes the transformation in distribution and consumption has brought to production? And how these changes in popular music, whether at the level of individual piece or at the level of the whole category, have influenced its market and consumers in turn? Whether the disappearance of record stores should understood as the loss of the public sphere or as a mere change in the form of the public, it is hard to imagine this change as a one-way process. Not only the economic factors outside the product, such as changes in the modes of consumption and the emergence of new channels of distribution, but the factors inside the texts of music consumed (or not consumed) must be considered.