My friend’s post made me ponder what brick and mortar record stores will look like in a future dominated by digital distribution (if brick and mortar still exist…)   I find walking through a good record store to be a enjoyable experience, with images and sounds passively hitting the senses as I wander around premise.  By passive, I mean one is bombarded by content not specifically requested.  Various songs are playing across different corners or rooms; and the walls and shelves are filled with visual content.  All of this is capable of passively influencing consumer behavior.  Contrast this with online stores today, where content is actively pulled via a search bar or preview list.  Without passive influence, I find that it’s much harder to discover new content, which is both less engaging for the consumer and provides fewer sales leads for the business.

To a many technologists, content discovery is the art of harvesting and distributing social information; however I think physical environments are equally powerful discovery and promotion channels

And that is exactly the opportunity lost in the likes of Amazon and iTunes stores.  Not enough promotion!  iTunes has that measily front page that brings at most a couple artists.  Why do we have to discover music in front of a computer?  We hear music in bars, restaurants, clothing stores, noisy room mates, and definitely at record stores.  In fact I’d argue those are more natural settings of music consumption, where listen mindset is is already open to outside influence.

The new digital brick and mortar

So what exactly could a record store do in the post-CD world?  They could be experience destinations—like art galleries filled with objects, images, and sounds.  But unlike art galleries, this is still primarily a sales outlet, where display must actually leads to sales.  Sales is where technology kicks in.  We need converged mobile media devices that can interpret physical input and link experience with actual SKUs.  This is the high-tech equivalent of grabbing the physical CD off the shelf.  Lets say one store’s design idea is to have those sound-isolating dome speakers, one way users can link what they hear to a purchseable product is to have their mobiles listen to and identify the song.  If you wish to convey more than song information (entire albums, artist bios) then RFID and 2D barcodes could work.  Users could scan their phone against readers adjacent to the “art” objects to pickup meta information.

Now onto the check out.  The most direct approach is to have users buy through their mobile interface.  But you risk users going to a different online store, especially a discounter and thus invalidating all the investments gone into building a cool store.  The store has to design a in-store payment process that is easier and faster for users than signing into the competing store on their mobiles.  I think it involves somehow preventing the meta-data from interacting with outside applications until the checkout has occurred.  Unfortunately this is the furthest I got in my brainstorm for now!