The day Comet plummeted was the day the music died; COMMENT 25.(News)

Byline: John Waters

THE closure next month of Comet Records, Temple Bar, one of the most lovable and resonant of Dublin shops, will represent more than 'a blow to the retail sector'. The closure, on April 15, will be a blow also to something else - to life as we have known it, perhaps even to life itself. Comet is one of Dublin's oldest and longest-surviving independent record stores, having existed for 26 years. It doesn't seem such a long time when you say it quickly but for those of us of a certain age, it is the greater part of meaningful time.

Originally, Comet was on Chatham Street, later drifting down to Crown Alley, then around the corner to its present location on Cope Street. The shop closed once before, in 2004, and reopened two years ago but, this time, I believe, it's final.

It's not necessary to have been a regular customer to feel regret about this. To pass along Crow Street and hear the sound of Led Zeppelin's second album emerging from the well of Brian O'Kelly's shop, to catch a glimpse inside of an greying punk flicking through a rack of CDs, was to summon up a half a lifetime of feeling, passion, remaking and belonging, to feel part of a community and an era that changed the way the world sounded and thought about things.

Comet's imminent death, therefore, says something ominous and saddening. The news that it will henceforth have an online existence does little to console me. What should sadden us is not just the disappearance of a landmark brand but the fact that this is yet another harbinger of the death of a particular relationship with music and musical artists.

The underlying factor, of course, is the Internet and the fact that much music is now downloaded rather than acquired in hard formats.

INDEED, I gather many people nowadays access and download their music needs illegally, a whole other story altogether. The past couple of years have seen the closure of two record stores I frequented in Blackrock and Dun Laoghaire. Whenever I mention such developments to people as something to be concerned about, I get the now-familiar spiel about the changing nature of the world and how this is just another inevitable aspect of the cultural transformation arising from the Web. This response seems to suggest that nothing is being lost, that this is just a different way of doing things.

I don't think so. A record store is more than some place you go to buy music. It is a place of sanctuary, to which lovers of music gravitate to give a tangible existence to their cultural life. There is something unique and irreplaceable about browsing through a record store alongside random others in search of something new or old to listen to. You went in to search for one thing and came away with another. You heard something on the shop's music system, asked the assistant what it was, thus beginning a whole new love affair - sometimes with the music.

I have never downloaded an album in my life and I don't intend to start now. Downloading strips away all the romance, reducing the ritual to one of acquisition, something akin to buying a loaf, reducing one of life's great pleasures to a deadly and mechanical function.

Call me sad but I can remember when and where I first came upon virtually every album I possess - where I was living, how I first came to hear the tracks that attracted me, where I bought the album and where I listened to it for the first time.

Part of the irreplaceable value of the record store it is the ritual of looking, sifting and deciding and then coming away to savour the experience of the music in various ways. After buying a new record, I like to go to a cafe and read the sleeve-notes, a tantric postponement of the moment of listening. There is something terribly privatised about downloads, the shortcircuiting of a key part of the sacrament of music by clicking a mouse and adding a handful of tracks to an iPod. Who remembers the day they downloaded Blonde On Blonde?

The abolition of traditional formats kills most of recorded music's tangible reality. A record, like a book, is by definition as much an object as a cultural format. It could never, for me anyway, be an arrangement of signals hovering somewhere behind the clouds, waiting to be called in to be digested and deleted. To be honest, I never really got over the shift from vinyl. There was something extraordinary - I dunno - concrete, about LPs and singles. That constant awareness you had of the movement of the needle on the indentations in the groove - the magic and mystery of that - seemed somehow to replicate the life and movement that had led to and accompanied the creation of the recording. You didn't just listen: you gathered around the record player, later the 'stereo', and paid attention to a performance.

I have other worries about all this also. I worry that, because it is now so easy to skip tracks or even to reject them at the point of download, music fans no longer encounter the experience of coming to love in the end the track they most disliked in the beginning. I worry about a blanding-out of public taste arising from this shift.

OF course, there are even worse aspects. This week, Brian O'Kelly, Comet's proprietor, observed that there is now a whole generation who have never paid anything for music and will probably never be willing to do so. I had a salutary encounter regarding this issue a couple of months ago, sitting in a cafe in Dundrum.

I had just bought a couple of CDs in HMV - the new albums from Neil Young and DeVotchka - and was sitting reading the sleeve notes in Starbucks. A young man opposite suddenly spoke. 'You must be the last person in Ireland who buys CDs,' he said.

We got talking and it emerged that he got all his music on illegal download and could see no problem with this. I asked him where, if musicians couldn't make a living by selling their wares, he imagined new music was going to come from.

He reckoned we wouldn't any more have the lifelong company of artists like Neil Young but might have more DeVotchkas, short-lived careers which burned out to make way for others. He thought this would be fine. Strangely, although he didn't seem to worry about stealing the creative efforts of struggling artists, he thought the success of Internet conglomerates like Google a great thing for democracy, creativity and public choice.

Call me old-fashioned but if anyone's going to get rich out of music, I'd sooner it was the guy with the guitar. Anyone with half a brain must realise that music itself cannot long survive the death of the communal marketplace in which it thrives. The web, therefore, is not just some new means of disseminating the creative life of human society but may well become its execution chamber.