The Val Shively article picks up on the impact of the internet making maintaining a shop uneconomic, and it echoes what's hitting our high streets with out of town shopping centres killing local smaller scale shops.
For those of us who used to enjoy casually going to the record shops back in the 70's, not even stopping to think about whether they would exist in the future, the chance to still find shops selling soul on vinyl has been prolonging the pleasure, but for most of us requires a fair old journey - they're not on your doorstep, and probably not in your town or even county.
But as the record shops slowly close up, that pleasure of thumbing through a stack of records gets tied down to record fairs, car boots and junk shops, and soul nights. You can buy on the internet, but just as iTunes doesn't give you that same physicality that a 7" platter can, neither does clicking on a website come close to walking into a record shop and glancing around to spot the box labelled "Soul".