And in the end

I had a dream, and it had nothing to do with civil rights. I wanted to work at a record store. Not some funky indie outpost but a giant retail behemoth where I could a) be in a room with more or less every album in the world, b) get a discount, and c) tell people what they should listen to. I started filling out job applications in ninth grade and pestered the store managers for years but never got the job.

Eventually I landed a newspaper gig with similar perks. But the death knell for the record superstore -- which sounded louder with the recent announcement that Tower Records is going out of business -- still stings.

Tower isn't cool. The lights are too bright, the product too mainstream, and the clientele is as likely to be shopping for the new Clay Aiken as a Velvet Underground bootleg.

That's the beauty of the place. It's like thumbing through an encyclopedia. No matter what you go in for, you stumble onto something else.

I love trolling for tunes online as much as the next music nut. My current obsession is Pandora.com , a streaming radio site that lets you create countless customized stations. Pour Some Sugar On Me Radio turns me on to new music that has characteristics in common with the Def Leppard song. Shins Radio streams tunes that shares musical DNA with the delightful indie-pop band. It's all so intuitive.

Wandering around Tower Records in Harvard Square last week wasn't. Perusing the Sadies, my eye drifted to Leon Russell. I went looking for Liz Phair and found Wilson Pickett. Thanks to the random wonders of alphabetical proximity, Jesse McCartney is separated from Megadeth by the slimmest margin -- a margin occupied by Mindless Self Indulgence.

I picked up the jewel boxes, held them in my hand, ogled the covers. No, I couldn't sample the music like I can on iTunes. But it's amazing what a weirdly informative vibe you can get from cover art. I remembered thumbing through the bins at my local Wherehouse store in LA's Westwood Village and seeing Emerson, Lake & Palmer's ``Brain Salad Surgery." I was transfixed by the full-lipped skull impaled on metal rods. Here was something fantastical, something heavy and arty and scary.

Which reminds me: This elegy for megastores might as well include a preemptive farewell to CDs. They'll be gone soon enough. As record stores continue failing to compete with the growing legion of downloaders as well as big box retailers (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Target, which offer broad discounts but narrow selection), the CD will vanish when digital delivery becomes the norm. Or be relegated, like vinyl, to specialty shops. I won't miss the cheap plastic cases, impossible packaging, or scratch-prone discs. I will desperately miss liner notes.

For all its ease, scope, and economy, the digital world suffers from at least one big deficit: There's no there there. Information abounds and so, in a way, does communication, thanks to the blogosphere and message boards and social networking sites. But the exchange of information is not the same thing as human contact.

You don't make plans to meet a friend at midnight on the Internet to buy a new album the second it comes out. There are no in-store appearances on your computer. Online, nobody sleeps on the sidewalk to be first in line to get concert tickets when they go on sale in the morning. You hit the send button, alone in your pajamas, usually to find out that the show is already sold out.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not grieving for some hippy-dippy analog past. The digital music frontier has given the recording industry a long-overdue kick in the pants -- it provides incredible opportunities for independent artists and intoxicating freedom for consumers.

I'm not even wistful for Sunset Strip slumber parties (full disclosure: I never camped out at Tower Records but my older sister did).

I will say that growing up in LA, the flagship Tower store on Sunset -- with its garish, gargantuan paintings of album covers slung on the side of the building and the most awesome billboard in all rockdom rising high above the Strip -- was basically the center of the universe. The Whiskey and the Roxy were just up the road. Capitol Records was down the street, just beyond Laurel Canyon. The stars themselves lived in the hills just behind the Tower store, and could often be found perusing the bins.

Until a few days ago the marquee in front of the landmark Hollywood store, built in 1969, read: It's The End of the World As We Know It. According to a sales clerk, LA-based liquidators Great American Group, the new owners, replaced the sign Monday with one that simply reads: Going Out of Business Sale.

Now that's poetic, partly because it is the end of an era, but also because this particular ending fills me with hope.

The collapse of the big record stores -- Boston's Virgin megastore on Newbury Street is expected to close its doors Nov. 4, and chains like Sam Goody, Musicland, and Wherehouse have already folded -- signifies the demise of a crippled business model. For years these stores have been stocked with overpriced, poor-quality, board-room-approved product. The privilege of forking over $18.99 for a plastic disc stuffed with filler and maybe two hit singles -- money that lines the suit pockets of Seagrams shareholders -- was bound to lose its charm, file sharing or no file sharing.

It's impossible to know what the recording industry will look like five years from now; questions of how to enforce legal downloading and legislate revenue streams have yet to be resolved. But right now music fans have access to a whole lot of music and, with songs selling for 99 cents a pop (or less, if you're a freeloader), being a music fan is affordable again.

I could wax rhapsodic about the album form, about arc and flow and vision that you can't manage in a 3-minute track. I'll mourn the tactile part of listening to music: holding a lyric sheet and following along with the words as the song plays, getting to know an artist through the art she's chosen as the visual companion to her songs, reading the thank yous. Maybe someone will invent a way for teeny-weeny liner notes to be spit from a slit in the sides of iPods, which will come with a miniature, collapsible magnifying glass. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Good bye, Tower Records. I'll miss you, and good riddance.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.