The Tower is Falling

Candy was nice enough this morning to send over a very telling article about Tower Records:

The Demise of Tower Records sign of digital age
by Rob Lever

Tower, whose non-US operations are not affected by the bankruptcy filing, failed
to keep up with a fast-moving landscape involving online retailers such as
Amazon.com and discounters like Wal-Mart, as well as a move to digital music,
say analysts.

While you cannot completely blame digital music for Tower Records bankruptcy, you can blame Tower Records lack of flexibility and attention to what their customers are buying and where. Tower Records does have a digital presence. However, it is used solely for the distribution of physical product with a sound clip here and there of popular titles.

The great thing about the internet is that you can get a lot out of it, especially if you are an international company such as Tower Records. The downside is, you have to put something into it to get that return.

So where did Tower Records fail? In the web eyes of its prospective customers. By failing to provide even the most basic of services provided by online competitors, they lost the attention of their customers. Most of these customers probably didn't even feel they were hurting Tower Records business. Why? Because Tower Records did not make it obvious even to their loyal customers that online business was important to them.

So, what could Tower Records have done? Tower Records has stated that online music providers are not their major competition, Wal-Mart is. Tower Records could never hope to beat Wal-Marts pricing so their attack should have been at easy of getting the music. Getting your music through download is probably the easiest way there is, plus, you can often cut cost since you don't need a physical establishment to sell the product or media to store it on.

Sale of digital music would have drawn attention back to Tower Records. If done properly, it would have pushed not only digital sales, but physical sales both online and off as well.

I think they are right, digital music downloads did not kill Tower Records. Tower Records killed themselves by ignoring digital music downloads. Yet another case of a brick-and-mortar business failing to adapt to a click-and-order world.