This week's announcement by supermarket giant Tesco of a further move into music retailing provides yet another reason to hope for the continued existence of local independent record stores.
On the back of £2.8 billion (€3.5 billion) profits for the past year, Tesco revealed plans to revamp their current music download offering and to position it as yet aother challenger to Apple's iTunes.
Tesco Digital will relaunch in May and aims to have more than 3.3 million songs available for download as MP3s by the end of the year. This is in contast to its current download store ( www.tescodownloads.com), where songs are available in Windows Media format only.
It's a further sign of Tesco's intentions to increase its revenues by moving away from traditional food and clothing lines. According to the company's latest figures, sales of such items as CDs, DVDs, books and electronics rose by nine per cent last year. Naturally, the move into music downloads will be followed by film and TV show downloads in time.
One sector which has suffered significantly from the move by Tesco and other supermarket chains into music retailing is the traditional record store.
There have been wholesale changes here in the past few years, with the disappearance of such once- significant players as Tower in the US and Virgin in the UK and Ireland.
There has also been a huge reduction in the number of independent stores, with many outlets now flogging mobile phones and DVDs where once they sold CDs and vinyl.
But independent stores are still in business, and tomorrow's worldwide Record Store Day ( www.recordstoreday.com) is a worldwide event endorsed by many big names in an attempt to re-focus attention on the local record shop.
While many bigger shops have been squeezed out, there are still many independent stores worldwide which continue to provide the kind of service, knowledge and enthusiasm about music which you won't find in your local Tesco.
And there are still dozens of Irish indies up and down the country worth supporting tomorrow - and every week - when it comes to buying music.
New acts are fleet of foot en route to Dublin
The way the live music calendar is shaping up, you could probably spend every single night during May and June at a live show and still miss out on some great acts.
Fleet Foxes and The DoDos are two acts who made a huge splash at this year's South By Southwest music festival in Texas and who are well worth catching when they visit Dublin in the coming weeks.
Now signed to Sub Pop and with a debut album due out in the summer, Fleet Foxes play Whelan's, Dublin, on June 14th, with support from Beach House.
San Franciscan duo The DoDos will play tunes from their excellent Visiter album when they play Crawdaddy, Dublin on June 13th.
Glasto: don't blame Jay-Z
The nonsense over why there are still tickets on sale for this summer's Glastonbury festival continues.
Oasis's Noel Gallagher entered the fray this week, telling BBC's Newsbeatshow that it's all Jay-Z's fault. "Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music, do you know what I mean?" claimed Gallagher. I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong."
Leaving aside the fact that Gallagher thankfully doesn't book the festival, Glastonbury's sales slump is due more to the audience's bad experiences with the weather in previous years than to some collective decision by the British middle classes to "diss" Jigga.
ETC
• Say hello to new Irish label Any Other City, which has opened its stall with a fine mini-album from New Amusement.
• Good to see Dublin's Boom Boom Room venue back in action. The excellent Spook of the Thirteenth Lock launch their debut album at the club's new location at Murray's, 34 Upper O'Connell St, tonight.
• Irish promoters obviously have more faith in the weather than the rest of us: outdoor shows were announced this week for Muse (Marlay Park, Dublin, August 13th) and Jay-Z (RDS, Dublin, June 26th).
