When HMV's flagship Shibuya store closed last month, the media were out in force grieving over the end of yet another era and sensibility. This was just not a nail in the coffin of the record business, but something like a catered funeral, with entertainment and plenty of speeches about what the store meant not only to the area (the storied "Shibuya-kei" indie movement reportedly sprang from HMV) but to the industry.
As everyone knows, online record sales and downloading, both legal and illegal, killed the record store. But don't blow taps just yet. A few blocks away, Tower Records is still open for business. In fact, while HMV and Shinseido, another major record chain, are losing outlets, Tower is actually planning to open new ones. It's not as if Tower is selling CDs while other stores aren't, but rather that Tower has decided to change its business model and believes that in order to survive it has to be aggressive. Management of HMV and Shinseido, it should be noted, were in recent years taken over by a Daiwa Securities fund, which is more interested in the bottom line than in the survival of physical delivery devices for music. Closing outlets is merely a sound business decision.
Tower Japan, however, is still managed by Tower Japan. In fact, Tower Japan is one of the last remaining vestiges of the worldwide Tower Records family, which used to be the biggest record chain in America, where there are no Towers any more. Tower Japan has decided not to go gently into that good night, and it's main means for staving off the Grim Reaper is record production and A&R. In July, the company started a project to seek out new artists, and will be accepting audition recordings until Sept. 15. From these recordings Tower will select 10 songs and turn each one into a CD single that they will sell for a mere ¥100. These CDs will only be available in Tower stores, and those artists who sell the most CDs will be offered the chance to make a full album that will also be marketed and sold by Tower.