I went to Tower Records in Atlanta once or twice in the late 60's-early 70's--it seemed impersonal and monolithic to me. Even the national chain Turtles (which was the McDonalds of record stores) felt more comfortable. But if I were looking for a relatively obscure artist, and if I had no access to the small record stores in Atlanta, Tower would have been the place to start. My favorite record stores when I was in grad school in Athens GA in the mid 70's-early 80's were Wuxtry and Chapter 3 (where Peter Buck worked). Wuxtry sold used records and Chapter 3 sold new records (lots of imports).

As far as the Internet goes, I'm one of those fossils who can tell you where I was when I first saw Mosaic (before that, I accessed the World Wide Web via the CERN line mode browser, and after that, Lynx--all from a Unix prompt). Later on, I refused to use Napster when it was a repository of copyright violations that deprived artists of their rightful revenue. After Napster became legal, it didn't seem that useful (nowadays I do use YouTube and Amazon Prime as discovery engines--but Medium is more productive).

Now that I've revealed my senescence, I have to say that I disagree with that Atlantic article, which says that Boomers only like the music from their era because they refuse to try out new music. Probably a good 2/3 of the music I listen to regularly is from this millennium--but it's from Sweden, not America (I do listen to some recent American artists as well). From my perspective, the vast majority of American music that's called pop (or what's popular in other genres as well) is homogenized, pablumized by industry profiteers.

It's not that I'm nostalgic. There is a boatload of music from before my birth year (1950) that I'm just now discovering. New music, old music--doesn't matter when it was first recorded. If it's good, it's good. Nor does the publication medium or distribution channel matter that much. I'm happy to continue discovering and enjoying something I never knew about.

End of old man's rant.