The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

The independent student newspaper of Northeastern University

The Huntington News

Column: Sounds like a change for music

Anyone who hasn’t visited Newbury Comics on Newbury Street and goes to Northeastern should be ashamed. Newbury Street is a prime hangout spot ‘- a pretty, albeit pricey, section of Boston that offers a nice walk or a range of shopping options, and Newbury Comics offers a great selection of reasonably priced DVDs and CDs.
Newbury Comics is a Boston-based music, movie, video game and comic book store with 27 locations in New England. But the one on Newbury Street is the original. Founded in 1978 by two friends from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newbury Comics started as a comic store before it grew to include other mediums.
Though the Newbury Street location appears to be thriving, Newbury Comics recently shut down their Alewife store, which begs the discussion ‘- are CDs and DVDs, reasonably priced or not, going out of style?
In the age of BitTorrent and iTunes, buying CDs and DVDs seems a bit outdated. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing system that allows the download of whole movies, albums or television shows in a relatively short period of time (an album can be downloaded in as quick as 10 minutes). BitTorrent is not a program, but a set of rules that other clients, like BitTorrent (a client named after the protocol), uTorrent and Vuze use to download files.
BitTorrent allows for faster downloads because users are able to download pieces of files from a variety of other users, even though the other users may not have finished downloading that file yet either. But programs like KaZaA and LimeWire are slower because they have to wait for the other user to finish downloading the entire file first.
For BitTorrent, users can search for files through a web interface instead of having to use a bulky program like KaZaA. Not only does this provide a wider selection of files to download ‘- it also helps BitTorrent hosts dodge legal issues because their servers are easier to pack up and move to other countries than a main database that KaZaA or LimeWire would use.
iTunes, as most college students probably know by now, is Apple’s brilliant solution to illegal downloading. The iTunes store sells not only popular music and movies that can be purchased and downloaded straight to a users’ iTunes and iPod, but also sells the discography of bands like indie favorite Farewell Flight, who only offer a hard copy of their CD on their MySpace page.
With iTunes, users can purchase shows by season before they air, so each new episode will automatically download to their computer after its premiere. The prices of CDs, movies and television series are also often cheaper than they would be in stores.
With the convenience of BitTorrent and iTunes, combined with the fact that it’s easier to download a CD from the comfort of a residence hall than to hop the T to buy one, it seems that stores like Newbury Comics and the similarly-themed CEX in Downtown Crossing may be suffering. And even though the ostracized Alewife store has closed, the Boston locations of Newbury Comics continue to thrive.
Perhaps it is the satisfaction of owning an actual DVD instead of storing it on a hard drive or iPod, or maybe it’s the pleasure derived from hunting through shelves of CDs to find that one rare album that keeps the original Newbury Comics overflowing with customers.
Newbury Street is a colorful and local hangout area for a lot of colleges from Northeastern to Emerson, and Newbury Comics is a landmark for those familiar with the area. Perhaps it is the store’s charm and history that maintains its popularity, but with iTunes progressing in leaps and bounds, how long can stores like Newbury Comics continue to fight the Internet?

‘- Terri Schwartz can be reached at [email protected].

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