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Last mainstream music outlets cling to life
Music still comes on disks: Visitors look through CD collections at the Duta Suara record store in Sabang, Central Jakarta, on Sunday
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usic still comes on disks: Visitors look through CD collections at the Duta Suara record store in Sabang, Central Jakarta, on Sunday.(JP/Iqbal Yuwansyah)
It was a quiet afternoon in the Musik Plus record store located inside the capital city’s oldest mall, the Sarinah Department Store, in Central Jakarta on a recent Saturday.
The concert version of Madonna’s mega-hit “Like a Virgin” played through loudspeakers with six of the store’s staff members and three visitors as the only audience.
One of the workers, Ahmad “Barry” Sobari, 34, said the situation was like what he encounters almost every day.
Having joined the record store in 2007, he recalled the days when he was a new hire. He used to clean all the cassettes and CDs in the store to help himself memorize the artists’ names and album titles. He created a drill to provide quick service to customers. Nowadays, Barry no longer does that as often as before since the store is not as busy as it was in the past decade.
Like other brick and mortar businesses, in the past few years the record store has struggled to stay relevant and cling to existence amid the demise of many mainstream music stores in the city. Established in 1992, Musik Plus in Sarinah is the last of the company’s stores after the management gradually shut down four other outlets in the city since 2013. At the sole remaining store, Barry said it is hard for staff to predict when customers would visit.
“The store is sometimes quiet, sometimes crowded. Unpredictable. People who come are only those who enjoy music in a physical format instead of digital, which is very limited in Jakarta nowadays,” Barry told The Jakarta Post.
Barry said the monthly turnover of Musik Plus is now less than Rp 300 million (US$21,380), a significant drop from Rp 1 billion per month in 2001. He noted that the store started to experience a decline in visitors in 2013.
He said he believed there were two factors behind this: digital downloads and an Indonesian music scene that he claimed was in a “hopeless situation” at the time.
“This situation was different from the early 2000s when Sheila on 7 and Padi were booming. We had to go to our distributors by ourselves because of the high demand at that time,” Barry said.
Still, the remaining store stands despite the lower number of visitors. Its strategic location in the heart of the city makes it accessible for foreign tourists.
Tourists from Malaysia and Japan, Barry said, often visit the store to buy Indonesian music collections.
One of the oldest record stores in Indonesia is Duta Suara, located some two kilometers away from Musik Plus. It also suffers from a dearth of customers. Opened in the 1970s, the store previously had 16 branches in shopping centers across Java. Due to sluggish business, the management shut down the stores one by one until only one was left in Sabang, Central Jakarta. The last closures were carried out in 2015 in the Paris van Java Mall in Bandung, West Java, Plaza Indonesia and Plaza Senayan in Central Jakarta, Kelapa Gading Mall in North Jakarta and Taman Anggrek Mall in West Jakarta.
“With fewer visitors, Duta Suara has only five remaining employees since not so many people want physical copies anymore,” said Mugeni, 37, who has been working at the store since 2002.
Besides competing with the developing digital music business, the mainstream stores like Duta Suara and Musik Plus are also in competition with alternative record stores, such as the ones in the hip Santa Market in South Jakarta.
However, the mainstream stores hold a dear meaning for Banu Adikar, 31. As a collector, he regularly hunts for CDs, which he described as more personal since the artists usually write messages of gratitude.
“I have been collecting CDs since 2009; that’s why seeing music stores close one by one breaks my heart,” he said, having recently purchased a copy of jazz band Pat Metheny Group’s Letter From Home at Duta Suara.
Another music collector, Arman Dhani, 31, however, said he was never familiar with the once-big record stores like Duta Suara and Musik Plus. He said he prefers the alternative and secondhand music stores at Blok M and Santa Market instead.
“They only sell releases from mainstream musicians, which I prefer to purchase from Spotify instead. I often look for rarer collections, but those only can be found in small alternative shops,” Arman said. (ggq)
