This item continues onward from item:154, where we discuss both national and local issues related to music retailing. Mostly we seem to collect CD store obituaries...106 responses total.
Another CD shop obituary... I hopped over to Windsor today and found that Dr. Disc will be closing on February 11. The sign in the window invited customers to stop in and pay their respects; viewing hours end at 6 pm. My visit was cut drastically short; I had planned on the store having its usual late evening hours. Dr. Disc was part of a southern Ontario chain of indie-oriented stores, and I didn't ask if the whole chain was going out of business, or just the Windsor store. I'd only been there a few times over the years; their folk stocks were always disappointing, but they did carry a lot of Canadian rock bands which I might have heard on the CBC-FM late night shows. Today, the stock has already been well picked over -- the store was about half empty -- and the sale discounts weren't too deep, so I wouldn't recommend a trip there for anything except sentimental reasons. Perhaps the relatively new (?) HMV store in the Devonshire Mall pushed Dr. Disc over the edge; the HMV store had a lot of goodies in it. ((preserved from item:154...))
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32294-2001Feb20.html The Post has a grim article on the consolidation of music retail power in the hands of Wal-Mart, KMart and Best Buy, and similar operations. Or, more specifically, in the hands of the buyers for those stores. The people who run one such buying service don't actually listen to the music. They don't care. The article says that a typical Wal-Mart carries around 4,000 titles. A Tower outlet would typically carry 20 times that many, but the increased selection is not helping to protect Tower's market share.
A Tower outlet carries 80,000 different selections? That's way higher than I would have guessed..
Counting all the old price stickers still on the items, yeah, that sounds about right ...
It's probably the Internet that's killing off local (recorded) music stores. These days I listen to mostly Cajun and Zydeco music, and trying to find much of that stuff in local stores is tough (although Borders probably had the best selection for the locals). But that's no problem--I can just order anything Cajun or Zydeco from Floyd's Records down in Ville Platte, Louisiana! I would have liked to support the local stores, but I wouldn't waste my money on most modern 'pop' music.
Damn, damn, damn. I thought I saw this coming when I saw the sales: electronics 30% off, used CDs 50% off. No, I wasn't going to be paranoid, they're just thinning the stock before the students go home. Wendy/hematite just told me: the East Lansing Tower is closing up shop. I'm not sure what this means; I think this means that CD in-store retailing is collapsing. This leaves NO "conventional" CD store in the immediate neighborhood of Michigan State, a university with 45,000 students; just three used CD stores. I'm really going to miss having access to a Tower Records. Even the small store in East Lansing had considerable value for me. The new mega-Barnes & Noble opening November 2001 in East Lansing is supposed to have a CD department.
That's totally weird.
how many stores does that make that have closed in that area now? Don't worry.. you can just get all of your music from Napster.. <eitysg>
Betcha someone could have success selling CDs in that area
near MSU if they where only going for 'current music college students
are buying' in much less square footage.
Tower probably had the stock it thought would satisfy the
*entire* Lansing area market, as normalized by a large corporate
view. It, of course takes much more square footage in probably
costly rental district.
Ann Arbor's music retail history doesn't seem to agree with Tim's theory from #9. Ann Arbor has seen not only giant mega-stores like Tower fold, but has also lost nearly every other size and shape of CD retailer -- mid-sized record stores like Wherehouse, local independents like Schoolkids' and SKR, small specialty retailers aiming at college listeners (I can't even remember the names, but several have attempted to establish ongoing concerns in Ann Arbor and almost all have failed -- the only one left at present (that I know of, at least) is the Grooveyard..) I can't believe that the only stores that can make money selling records in a college town are Best Buy and Wal-Mart. A year ago everyone was blaming the internet retailers but none of them are doing particularly well, either. Where's all the money going? CD prices are at a record high and every year sets a new record for the amount of money Americans are spending on recorded music. How can that be possible when the retail outlets are withering up and dying?
(I'd thought that Best Buy [and possibly others] were selling CDs as loss-leaders, meaning that they *aren't* making money on music. that might account for why more money is spent on music without profits being generated directly by it.) (also, I imagine the used record stores are doing just fine making money in Ann Arbor, and maybe in other college towns, too.)
And I know people who still insist that Napster is not affecting CD sales. CD sales are still going up, they say. But not in the vicinity of colleage campuses, where they've plunged, I observe. But CD sales are still going up, they say.
re #11: OK, I've heard that too.. If it's true, then seemingly *nobody* (or damn close..) is making money in music retail. How can that possibly be true? Put a different way, all of that money has to be going somewhere. Conventional wisdom has it that it's not going to the artists, record stores are dropping like flies, etc.. The traditional bogeyman in this scenario is the big, bad record company, but I'm not sure I buy that.. Do they really monopolize (or oligopolize, I suppose..) the production, distribution, and sale of recorded music to such an extent that they're the only ones in the whole chain who are able to make money? How is this supposed to be sustainable in the long term? re #12: Ann Arbor's music retail woes began long before anyone had ever heard of Napster, and evidence that this is true elsewhere has been widely trumpeted by Napster supporters, if not by the record companies. It's probably fair to assume Napster is a factor of some sort in college-area record sales, but it's by no means safe to assume that it's as important as you suggest.
To answer Dave in resp:8 :: I count seven big CD stores gone from my usual circuit, but my circuit is unusual because I am bimunicipal -- my daily life includes both Ann Arbor and East Lansing. The casualty list is: 2 Michigan Wherehouse Records, 2 Tower Records, and then in Ann Arbor, the original Schoolkids, and the spinoff/successor stores SKR Classical and SKR Rock/Pop/Jazz/Blues. I started an item on Cafe Utne to ask if this sort of a wipeout was being seen anywhere else, and while this is not a scientific survey, so far the answer seems to be no, the catastrophic wipeout is a Michigan phenomenon. (Mike: what does Seattle's retail scene seem like? Mickey, how's Austin doing?)
Austin music stores seem to be thriving. I admit that I'm not frequenting retail music stores enough to observe any slow downs, but they do seem to be expanding all the time. I'm not sure if this growth is simply a mirror of the continued growth in other sectors, or if this has something to do with the seemingly insatiable appetite for music for which Austinites are known. Whatever the reason, I am thankful that there are so many options, and I try to support the local retailers whenever possible. I tried to list the stores with a sizeable retail music section, and came up with this: Waterloo Records (the granddaddy of Austin's independent music stores, still doing well in their downtown location, despite traffic and construction snarls) - Jupiter Records <www.jupiterrecords.com> (recently opened a second store in So. Austin) - ABCDs (www.chainstoressuck.com) another wonderful independent, around since 1987. I like this store a bunch, because they have two smaller soundproof rooms, one for classical and the other for jazz. - Wherehouse Music (formerly Sound Warehouse, and I'll forever mourn their passing) ... 3 locations in Austin - Tower Records - one location, on The Drag right across the street from the UT campus - Barnes & Noble, at least 4 of the newer super stores around the metro - Borders (!) two Austin locations There are probably more I'm missing, but there you have it. Music is big business in Austin. The office of the Governor has even set-up a website clearinghouse to promote Texas music. http://www.governor.state.tx.us/music/
I'm back from making a run at the East Lansing Tower, my first trip there since the closing was announced. The sale is $4 off the normal prices of most discs. There is a stark contrast between this Tower closing and the closings in Ann Arbor -- there is still an awful lot of merchandise in that store. Is it possible that even at sale prices, MSU students are no longer willing to buy CDs? In last year's closing of Where House Records in East Lansing, the store was quickly stripped of the best stuff. Classic rock seems particularly well stocked. I picked up two Jethro Tull CDs for $9 each, and Horslips/LIVE (a 2-cd set) for $18. There's some personal irony in the Horslips item; I almost got it back in the 1970s at a long-forgotten head shop and record store in downtown Lansing, but that store went out of business before I bought the copy. I never saw that item again in the LP era; it's recently out on a band-approved CD from Edsel, after the band won a court fight against their old label. But I digress.
I want one of that! (The Horslips.)
I don't think it's a matter of students not buying CD's, it's still that they can find what they want cheaper. That's the main reason my friends and I never shop at Tower, and are tentative now because with the discounts they prices are starting to get back into reasonable college student prices. And as a Napster user, I *have* bought more CD's since using it. I've found a lot of bands that I never would have heard of, and was able to decide not to waste my money on CD's I heard were good but when I listened to them they sucked. <shrug>
Here's a discouraging word from musicalamerica.com via Usenet. Go to www.deja.com and search on "Tower Records" to see the whole thing. The story reports that Tower has stopped buying new releases from three major independent classical distributors: Allegro, Harmonia Mundi and Qualiton. Tower appears to be in deep financial trouble and it has pressured the major labels to give it deep wholesale discounts, and to allow it to wait a year to pay for product. Universal, Sony, BMG and EMI have gone along, WEA has balked, and the independents feel they cannot afford such generous terms for Tower. Quote: "All parties quoted for this article insisted on anonymity -- understandable, for, without Tower, selling classical CDs at the retail level would be well nigh impossible. Tower is just about every classical distributors largest retail customer." Bankruptcy is rumored to be a possibility.
It's got to be the fault of those pesky kids, trading symphony recordings on Napster.. [Did anyone else watch Futurama this week with its digs at "Nappster" (aka "KidNappster")?]
Little preachy, I thought. But still funny... "If you're an investor, just dump your money into the hole" (points to hole in floor).
resp:20 - funny, Mike, but of course classical isn't where Tower ever made its money, and consequently that's not how they're losing it. Since a vast percentage of my classical purchases are CDs from those very distributors from Tower, I'm concerned about alternate sources. Searching for classical recordings on Amazon is very difficult, and browsing for just about anything on Amazon (a la wandering the aisles of a brick&mortar store) is just about impossible. Any better online sources?
Well, that was pretty deafening. I've made my first visit to Tower since the above news hit. There are two Towers in my area: one has a smaller, but choicer, classical selection than the other, and it was the smaller one I visited. So far, at least, it doesn't look much different, and I even found a BIS release I'd been meaning to buy. I forget whether Chandos is one of the labels hit by the distributor crunch, but they didn't have a new Chandos release I was looking for. OTOH, I'd read about it in the latest issue of BBC Music, and anything they mention often takes months to show up.
We discussed the problems of online browsing for classical CDs recently, and in that discussion you (David) had the suggestion of browsing a Schwann catalog instead. I haven't got a better solution. CD Connection's search functions may be a tiny bit better than Amazon's. Other than that, there's Borders, which in Ann Arbor was the weakest of the three classical CD shops, but now it's all we have left. I suspect the model becomes that one will now browse magazines and radio shows, rather than actually being able to paw through piles or lists of discs.
A day or two after not finding that new Chandos release I'd been wanting at Tower, I found it at Barnes and Noble. Which has a classical CD selection at least as large as the nearest Borders, and is one heck of a lot easier to get to. Pretty small compared to Tower even now, though, and lacking all the useful tools - Penguin Guides, posted reviews, classical-only listening booths - that make Tower such an easy place to shop. Sigh.
http://www.latimes.com/business/20010623/t000051875.html Excerpts: "Tower Records... may have to file for bankruptcy protection if it cannot restructure weakening finances in the coming months, according to the nation's top bond rating agency." ... "The 41-year-old Tower is being squeezed by a decline in album sales and a protracted price war with discount houses that is driving down profit margins." ... "Music merchants say sales are down 5% to 10% for the first six months of the year, following disappointing showings by releases from such big-name acts as Ricky Martin, Aerosmith and Depeche Mode.... According to research firm SoundScan... album sales at chain stores are down about 3.6% from a year ago." "Record chains such as Tower also blame their tepid sales on cutthroat competition from discount houses such as Best Buy, which purchase CDs from manufacturers for about $10.80 and often sell them for less than $10 to lure customers in to buy other products such as electronic equipment..." "In a regulatory filing, Tower said it also would close or sell its operations in Canada."
Depeche Mode still sells enough records to be counted as a substantial influence over slumping record sales?
I went out record shopping yesterday with a walletful of cash, determined to buy several albums I'd borrowed from the library and enjoyed.. I found several of the albums I'd intended to pick up, as well as several other interesting-looking possibilities, but I wound up leaving the store empty-handed -- I just couldn't bring myself to pay what the store was asking for the CDs. The least-expected I'd selected was priced at $16.99, and a couple of my selections were $18.99 for a single new CD. If I'd gone to a store like Best Buy instead of the independent record store at which I'd been shopping, I probably could have saved a dollar or two per disc, but I doubt I could've brought myself to buy most of my selections even at a "mere" $15.99 per CD. The area where I live in Washington state has an 8.6% sales tax, so a $17.99 CD costs me almost $20.00 total.. Back when new CDs were routinely priced in the $11.99 - $12.99 range, I used to go to the record store and come home with 7 or 8 new purchases every couple of weeks. It wasn't unusual for me to buy 100 to 150 new records a year in those days. Nowadays, though, I can't clearly remember the last time I left a record store with more than three full-length releases, and I've probably purchased less than 20 new albums so far this year. It's true that my purchases have slowed partly because I've already collected a lot of the albums I wanted, but even these days, when I rarely try out new artists because I don't want to take a $20 gamble, there's still a backlog of music on my "I really ought to buy that.." list. At the current rate, however, most of the entries on that list are going to remain there indefinitely. If the RIAA wants to know why record sales are dropping, my best guess is that they're pricing most people out of trying new music..
Not directly related, but I did want to mention it: amazon.com seems to have moved to selling most CDs at list price. They proudly mention that they are throwing in free shipping on most orders, though.
From the June 15th promotional e-mail from the NorthSide label, which specializes in issuing Scandinavian folk & folk-related music for the North American market: > At the same time, we're dealing with growing problems > at U.S. record retail, so unless you're one of the > lucky few that has a great independent record store > in your town, be sure to visit our website often > and take advantage of our secure server to buy direct. They did not elaborate on what those problems were.
No wonder I stopped buying albums. I went and bought a few at Best Buy, becuase they were on sale having just come out (one of them being Exciter by Depeche mode) and one that managed to be $6.99 (A band called Saliva) and was thrilled and had to put 2 others back but bought 3. I was amazed. A lot of the releases I want to get, Musicals, old Hair Bands, my eclectic tastes, I can't. And some wonder why I used Napster. Thpppt. I would buy a LOT more cd's if they were back around the $10 side rather than the $20 side. A LOT more.
The new Afro Celt 3 was on the shelf @ Borders for 18.99 last week, so I added it to my wish list and left. This week it's on sale for 12.99, so I got it. Whenever I hear something new, I'll almost always try out Encore Records to see if someone else paid full price and didn't like it. That's how I got AfroCelt's 2nd disk for 8.00.
Rotten to the core... An LA Times story, and a NewMediaMusic story derived from it, reporting allegations that some major labels are rigging the SoundScan charts: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000057351jul13.story http://www.newmediamusic.com/articles/NM01070298.html The scam is pretty elementary. The major label hires an independent promoter. The independent promoter gives a bunch of free promo discs to a CD store which reports to SoundScan and has the CD store employees scan the free discs multiple times. The CD store then gets to sell the free discs at normal price. Since the discs were not bought at wholesale, the retail price becomes pure profit to the store. The artist is screwed because, as free promo discs are involved, no royalties are paid. Soundscan itself is exasperated. "'The labels pay us to run a system that delivers an accurate sales count,' (soundscan exec) Shalett said. 'What's the point of them paying somebody else to mess with it? It's insane.'" NewMediaMusic suggests that the scam is motivated by internal record company politics; people who stand to be fired if a release they are responsible for performs poorly.
Curiouser and curiouser.... I've given up on thinking that any given development will be the last straw that will turn people against the music industry: there have been far too many last straws already, and we're apathetic and cranky, but we still buy from them. Still, I'd have fun following this if it became a big scandal; I'm rooting for it just for that.
Options for obtaining music from somewhere other than "the music industry" (a pretty broad term) are currently somewhat limited, and require some hefty searching and self-starting. Sure, folks tried to bypass it, but ...
The State Street Harmony House in Ann Arbor seems to have bitten, or to be in the act of biting, the dust. They have a 'for rent' sign in their window.
So State Street is where the Harmoney House was hidding?
Yeah. I think everyone in the Grex music conference who commented on the Harmony House store wondered what the heck they thought they were doing, putting a mall-quality CD store, which could compete on neither price nor selection, in the State & Liberty area.
Yeah. The only time I went to Harmony House to shop was when I was looking for a "Top 10" soundtrack. I decided after one visit to never shop there again.
So for those of us who aren't in Ann Arbor any longer but are still keeping score, what's left?
Well, now, let's see: Borders, of course. Discount Records is still standing. There's that weird used CD place over on the other side of campus with the CDs in the huge locked glass cases; they sell a fair amount of new CDs. Schoolkids in Exile still there.
And Encore, Wazoo and PJs. I've found that my shopping for new CDs at stores has collapsed. For new CDs, I'm shopping only at Borders, Elderly Instruments in Lansing, and very occasionally at Schoolkids-in-the-Basement. Schoolkids is limited both in stock and in hours open, so I haven't been going there much. My rough guess is that I'm buying maybe 1/4 of what I used to buy in the local new shops. For a lot of what I want, it's not even worth the time to check Borders: obscure folk/world and classical CDs just aren't being stocked much in Ann Arbor any more. I miss being able to wander out either from home or work to browse through bins of CDs, but it seems that era has ended.
Browsing through web sites just isn't the same. For that matter, browsing through CDs wasn't the same as browsing through LPs. Not only was it physically easier to flip through the LPs, but (at least in classical) they had liner notes on the back that could help you decide whether to buy something you didn't know. I've been tempted, on occasion, to slit open CD wrappers in the shop so as to read the booklet. I'd buy a lot more CDs if I could. In this respect, the web is a slight improvement. Not much, but a little.
Most used stores let you do just that.
New CDs, Dan, new CDs. Used ones don't even have wrappers. Some new-CD stores will indeed let you do that. But I can't imagine making that request of the drones who staff my Tower's classical department.
Borders has a new, different kind of listening station in the newly opened stores...a way to listen in a multitude of CDs from one place, instead of only 5 at a time.
Van Morrison, "Moondance". One of the true classics...
At the Frandor Mall in Lansing yesterday, I unexpectedly stumbled over a new Michigan Where House Records outlet. (This is the locally- owned small chain which used to operate campus stores in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, not the California-based chain with the similar name.) Alas, it's beyond easy walking distance from my office, but I will have to stop in there and see if their stock is interesting enough to merit any business. If anyone is looking for it: the store is just to the east of Bollert's Ace Hardware.
((I decided to move resp:49 to a different item...))
East Lansing has a store selling new CDs again, after a dry year. The Barnes & Noble CD department is probably about as good a CD shop as East Lansing has ever seen, except for the late lamented Tower. The classical section is probably less interesting than the old Michigan Where House classical section at its peak. What makes it particularly interesting is the new music preview system, from a company called RedDotNet. They claim that customers can hear preview samples from any disc in the store, and this seems close to correct. The headphones are attached to a laser scanner (the Red Dot of the company name); the customer scans the bar code of any random CD, and you get a menu of 30-60 second samples from every track on the disc. My guess is that the samples are MP3 or similar compression. They are stored centrally, and a clerk told me that updates come from the Home Office every week or so. The clerk told me that a prof we know from the Music department spent three hours in the store on opening night, playing with the preview system. The system had most of the items I checked, about a dozen. It had Steeleye Span and a Mahler Resurrection Symphony. The only discs which did not have preview tracks available were Sigur Ros, and a duet album from Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel. The East Lansing B&N stores world music alphabetically by artist, with no geographical divisions, so the Irish nestle up against the Africans. The world music section is small enough that you could browse through it all pretty quickly.
Back in resp:music2,154,217 (music2, item 154, resp 217) I wrote about the Virgin Megastore on Michigan Avenue. The store was still pretty appealing when Leslie and I returned there this spring; but we were there again on Friday, and the store has crashed. The biggest disappointment was the dismantling of the classical section. Classical was forced out of its separate room, the one with classical albums playing in the background; it was shoved in a back corner and cut by maybe 40%. The old classical music room is now the DVD room. World music seemed gutted as well; I couldn't find any discs that I wanted. There were a couple of British Isles/Celtic items worth looking at, and they were priced at an appealing $14. I settled for the new Kathryn Tickell CD and passed on the Bachue. And there was a Tracey Dares CD I had not seen before. But that was it; two CDs bought, and just one tempation passed up, from a store where previously I had found armloads of stuff. The standard price of $18.99 was really putting me off buying anything which might have been stocked at any other store. We're unlikely to go out of our way to stop there on our future Chicago trips.
It's hard to see how a record store could be both price competitive AND located on Michigan Avenue, but $18.99 for most discs just makes me want to cry..
Second-hand followups to some of my recent reports: resp:52 :: There is a Usenet report on rec.music.classical.recordings that the Virgin Megastore in Times Square has drastically pruned its CD section to make way for videos, much as Chicago did. So perhaps this was a corporate decision for the whole chain. resp:48 :: A co-worker told me that the Where House Records shop in Frandor Mall in Lansing has closed; this is just five weeks after I learned that it existed. I never got to visit it.
A shame if they don't think they can make good business in October, November and December.
The venerable Canadian firm Sam the Record Man has filed for bankruptcy. There are two good stories at http://www.globeandmail.com but unfortunately Globe and Mail URLs are about three lines long, so you'll have to search on "sam's" to find the news story from October 31 and a memorial from November 1. Sam's had outlets all across Canada, but the important store was the one on Yonge Street in Toronto. Back when I was a college student, my friends and I experienced something we called "the East Lansing/Toronto Spacewarp." We went to Toronto, lots of times. And in those days, the four-story Sam's, with the landmark animated neon LP design on the front, was probably the best record store in Canada, and one of the best in the world. Long before "world music" became a viable genre, Sam's had a killer section of international music; I got some fun Eastern European albums from there. And lots of Canadian and British Isles folk, and jazz, and classical... sometimes it seemed like if it was released anywhere in the world, then there was a good chance that Sam's had it. I don't think I ever saw a selection of imported records that was better than Sam's. I didn't get to Toronto much in the CD era. Senna would tell me that the store was declining due to commercial pressure from the HMV down the street. When I made my last trip to Sam's about three or four years ago, it was clear that the store wasn't what it had been 15 years ago, but I still came away with a good armload of Canadian, British and European folk and roots music, including one treasure I never expected to find -- a long out-of-print disc on Billy Bragg's old Utility label by Jungr & Parker. (And the Sam's clerk marked it down by 40% -- "This has been here far too long," she said, when I hesitated at the somewhat high price.) I hit HMV on that same Toronto trip; the HMV store was newer and shinier, and it wasn't bad, but it still didn't have the breadth of stock that Sam's had, even in Sam's long decline. Thanks to Sam Sniderman, age 81, who ran such an important store for its entire 63-year life.
Hmmm.. I'd never even heard of Sam's but you've got me regretting the fact that I never checked it out on one of my Toronto visits..
Followup to resp:52 on Chicago stores :: On Tuesday's trip to Chicago I visited Tower Records in the Loop, and Crow's Nest Music in the Music Mart Mall, about two blocks away, about 200 S. Wabash and 300 S. State respectively. I'm pleased to report that the classic big city CD store is still clinging to life... Tower on Wabash is the old Rose Records store; Rose was the thriving local chain 15 years ago, and I had visited the Rose store back around 1985. Tower didn't change much; it's an old-fashioned rabbit warren of a store on three floors. The pop/rock section of the first floor did seem a little thin, but the classical section on the second floor was dazzling -- in fact it was too overwhelming for the limited shopping time I had available -- and the world music selection on the third floor was quite choice. (I'll mention the purchases in some other item, to keep followups about the music itself out of this item.) Tower Classical had the biggest selection of opera DVDs I'd ever seen in one store. Crow's Nest is a big new spacious store. They may have even a bigger pop/rock selection than the Tower, but the classical and world music sections are somewhat smaller, though still decent. The nice thing about Crow's Nest is the price: almost all of the discs are $14.99 or $15.99, which is cheap these days.
followup on resp:56 :: On a classical music directory site, I've found a link to a Toronto Globe & Mail story, headlined: "Music is sweet again at Sam's." Unfortunately this was published on January 12 and is no longer available through the Globe & Mail web site. The headline suggests that somehow the flagship Sam's store in Toronto has managed to ride out the corporate bankruptcy. ???
I've tried several times to enter a longer review of my visit to San Francisco's Amoeba, a huge used record store with an impressive selection. Unfortunately I've been having connection problems and have lost two previous drafts, so I'll restrict myself to just the basics.. Visited Amoeba for the first time this past week and found the San Francisco location to be the best used record store I've visited, ever, with a broad stock of popular music, decent prices, and a surprising stock of international music (when was the last time you visited a used-record store that had a Fado section?) I'm told that the Berkeley location may be even better, I'll check it out on my next trip to the Bay Area. For the moment, though, I'm just savoring the long-lost feeling of walking out of a record store with an armful of interesting discs (13 titles, some of them doubles..) for under $100. For those who visit San Francisco and want to check out Amoeba, it's about a block or so from where Haight Street ends at Golden Gate Park.
There's also a store called "Rasputin" near the Ameoba in Berkely, and it's another very good store.
I'll be sure to check it out next time I'm down there. I've found Seattle's music retail scene, both new and used, to be quite disappointing. On the other hand, living near a store like Amoeba could be quite hazardous to my wallet..
What happened to Cellophane Square, a record shop in Seattle? Are they even still in business? Guess I haven't been out there since 1989 or so.
There's still a Cellophane Square in the U District and another in Bellevue. I haven't found them terribly impressive.
following on from resp:56 :: we made a day trip to Toronto on Saturday, so I had a chance to check out the big Yonge Street store of Sam the Record Man, the chain which filed for bankruptcy in December. It was an odd sort of stock reduction sale. CDs which were in the long plastic theft-reduction cases were 20% off; CDs which were not in such cases were 60% off. And then we paid in mighty American dollars, so the 60%-off discs which were stickered at $20 Canadian came out to about $5 each in US money. But the store has been pretty well picked over. I did get a fistfull of Canadian Celtic CDs, mostly from the maritimes, and at the higher price I got the one in-print disc by the French band Lo'Jo which I didn't have -- that's the sort of rare and exotic thing which Sam's used to stock in abundance. I ran into two old Toronto friends in the store, and they were of the opinion that the Sam's bankruptcy is a scam to screw the CD distributors. Their news, confirmed by a clerk who worked there, is that the Sam's operation is being bought out of bankruptcy by the children of the original Sam Sniderman. So it will be interesting to see what develops. The HMV store two doors down from Sam's was its usual big and bland self; they had a lot of British Isles & Celtic stuff, but not much new. All I got from my shopping list were the two most recent discs from the Quebecois band La Bottine Souriante.
Jim Leonard writes about his bankruptcy at length in the March issue of the Ann Arbor Observer. Leonard was a fixture in the classical music business in Ann Arbor for almost a quarter century; he managed SKR Classical since it opened in 1986, then became the owner in the late 1990s as Steve Bergman's Schoolkids Records faltered. All of his stores failed in January 2001; newcomers can find our discussion of the collapse in conf:music2 (forgive me for not looking up which item number). He doesn't write much about the music retail business; "I'd been a fool," he writes, to take over the Schoolkids storefronts as the Internet was shaking up music sales, both through online retail and through Napster. Leonard owed $1.25 million when SKR closed; I can't see from the article if that total includes $200,000 in unpaid tax debt which is also mentioned. The tax debt is not wiped out by the bankruptcy, and Leonard says he could be paying on it for decades.
I live in the San Francisco area, but I'd never heard of Amoeba.
Rasputin's, also mentioned, is my choice for used rock CDs. They also
have the honor to employ one of the world's leading Tolkien linguists
('cause a Ph.D. in German won't get you a cup of coffee).
The San Francisco Amoeba is on Haight near Golden Gate Park. I'm not sure where the Berkeley location is located..
Heard on WWJ-AM news radio this morning: the venerable Michigan retail chain Harmony House is giving up and shutting down. Some stores will be closed next week, others in the fall. The chain had been trying to find a buyer for several years, if I remember the old news stories correctly. I don't have time to write much of an obit for them right now. Most of their stores will not be much of a loss for serious music fans, but their classical specialist shop in Royal Oak was world-class. With its demise, there will be no classical retail shop better than the Ann Arbor Borders anywhere in the state.
I'm surprised no one mentioned that Discount Records (part of HH?) closed up shop. That was the store that once employed a young James Osterberg I do believe.
No, Discount Records was part of the Sam Goody/Musicland operations -- I forget which name was at the top of the corporate hierarchy, we had a big argument about this with Ashke a year or so ago. Anyway, Discount Records was certainly not a part of Harmony House, since the short-lived Ann Arbor Harmony House outlet was just a few storefronts away on State Street. I dimly recall an earlier published rumor that Discount would close this summer when their lease was up. The store had been sinking for years; my sister-in-law tended to get me Sam Goody gift certificates which I could spend there, and it usually took some effort to find anything I wanted to buy. I think this means that Borders and Schoolkids-in-the-basement are the last sources of new CDs downtown, with Best Buy and Media Play out on the periphery of town.
Cirucuit City and Borders at Arborland.
Both Meijers, Both Targets, Wal-mart and K-mart also sell CDs.
I think this may mean that Schoolkids-in-the-basement is the only "pure" new CD store left in town, the only one selling (almost exclusively) new music recordings. Every other retailer listed above relies on books, electronics, or general merchandise.
This is disturbing. I may have to get Bruce used to trekking to Lansing. At least Elderly's isn't in trouble, is it?!
Elderly Instruments is showing no signs of distress. However, at Elderly, the CD department is just a small-to-medium sized part of the business; instrument sales remain their core, as far as I can tell from their new general catalog. Elderly is also a large-scale mail order operation, and they seem to have adapted well to the Internet.
I recall being impressed that Elderly has a different selection of folk music, as compared to Borders or the old Schoolkids selection. Not neccessarily better or worse, just different enough to make the trip and shopping worthwhile.
Today's Free Press web site reports that surviving Harmony House stores have increased the discount to 40% in an attempt to get rid of everything by the end of September. The Royal Oak classical store is still reported open.
Found while web browsing: the news that Tower Records has opened a Metro Detroit store in Birmingham. A review of their classical department appears at: http://www.freep.com/entertainment/music/clas11_20020811.htm
I went to the Harmony House on Woodward and the new Tower Records in Birmingham thsi weekend. Harmony House: There was a mob of people at the store. When I went Saturday afternoon, there was still plenty left, with a lot of unsorted boxes on the floor. I left with 12 CDs for around $80. Tower Records: I can't say I'm overly impressed with the store. It had some obscure stuff and decent prices on CD singles, but charged more than Borders.
(Hi Mike!!!)
I was at the Canton Harmony House yesterday. Ford Road at
Seldon Ave., Canton. They are still open. They said they got 2
other closed stores worth of stock. It did look like they where
not selling much, so I had to ask. Not filled with customers,
either. They said the Royal Oak store reported 150 customers the
first night of the 40% off.
Anyway, If you are looking for "The Remains of Tom Lehrer"
the box set that came out a couple of years ago, they still had 2.
40% discount on $48 is not bad. I would say a rather good stock
still there, including other box sets.
(Hi Ken!) I went to the Canton Harmony House on Monday. The store had maybe 5 other people in it for the hour I was there. They still had a decent selection. I found some more CDs, including some stuff I just decided to try on a whim.
STeve and I stopped in at the Schuler's Books & Music in Meridian Mall, which is in Okemos. From the price stickers and the store fixtures, it looks to me like Schuler's has become a rebranded Borders store. CD selection is roughly equivalent to that at the Arborland Borders. (This probably explains why I heard that a Borders store was going into the new mall north of East Lansing on US 127, but the store directory for that mall only shows Schuler's Books.) The Schuler's stores are likely to be a better selection for my CD tastes than the Barnes & Noble in downtown East Lansing; but, I can walk to B&N from the office while Schuler's requires a car trip.
From back in the 70's or so, Schuler's 'hired' Borders to do their distribuiton and marketing. They also get to be exclusive in their market (no Borders cross-competting with them).
The Sacramento Bee reports that Tower Records is winding up their UK operations; within four months their signature store at Picadilly Circus will be turned over to the Virgin chain. Another store of great memories gone. When I first read a Usenet suggestion that one could import CDs directly from the UK in the late 1980s, it was Tower Records at Picadilly Circus that was the recommended store. Now this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but around 1988 it was a new and exciting way to buy hard-to-get CDs. I would call Tower early in the morning and place my order with a young American emigre' woman who worked in their mail order department, and I got imports from Tower until I found the UK folk music specialists around 1990, when coincidentally Tower's shipping charges got outrageous. We made a pilgrimage to the Picadilly Circus store on our UK trip in 1995, and got armloads of European folk stuff and a few nice rock items too. I remember the store stereo playing The Charlatans, and I remember finding the now-scarce CD of Michelle Shocked's "Texas Campfire Tapes."
I bought a couple of Renaissance revival albums (one by Annie Haslam, one by Michael Dunford) at the Piccadilly Circus Tower. Out here in the Bay Area, the decreasing selection of classical music at Tower and the increasing selection at Borders and B&N have not yet come anywhere near into parity. There's only one other retailer that sells new classical recordings, Musical Offering in Berkeley, which I can rarely get to and which has a an excellent but idiosyncratic collection whose tastes don't always match up with mine. Everything else is gone. I doubt the situation for new non-classical music is much better, outside of Down Home's equally idiosyncratic selection, though we have some outstanding used stores in the non-classical field, both CD and vinyl.
Ken: The Charlatans? You're thinking of the early San Francisco sound band whose gimmick was Edwardian costumes? I don't think I've ever heard them, though I've certainly seen enough photographs of them. I never got the Texas Campfire Tapes, and now perhaps it's too late. I bought Short Sharp Shocked when everyone in Alps was talking about her, but never felt grabbed enough by it to want to explore any further.
The Charlatans I'm referring to are the current British rock band whose USA releases are marked "The Charlatans UK." I knew this meant that there had been an earlier band in the US using the name, but I didn't know anything about them; thanks for filling in this gap for me.
Seems like I saw an album from them a couple of years ago but I'm not sure the Charlatans UK are still together. I think one of their members died in a car crash after getting out of prison or something like that. Loved the organ intro at the start of "Weirdo", though..
There's a photo of the '60s Charlatans in their full Edwardian get-up here: http://www.marshallphoto.com/mp.v1/photos/Rock_US/Charlatans/Charlatans_ 3805-20.html
resp:85 :: UK paper The Guardian ran an obit of sort for the Picadilly Circus outlet of Tower Records, joined with an obit for the founder of classical label Hyperion Records. http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,899071,00.html
mziemba mentioned this to me a while back. The Detroit chain Harmony House managed to avoid liquidation and they are going to continue with their classical store, and their large all-purpose flagship store, both on Woodward Avenue. Harmony House's announcement links to some media stories. http://www.harmonyhouse.com/announcement.asp
The description of the Piccadilly Tower outlet's emptying shelves is sad; but remembering my own visits to the place, plus the large number of other record stores whose closing sales I've attended, generates mostly the wish that I'd been there to pick up some bargains. During the late 80s, when record stores were closing out their regular vinyl stock, I picked up an enormous number of bargains from various shops, but I never was able to confirm my prediction that, when the last LP was left in the last classical record bin, it would be of works by Max Reger. A link at the bottom of the Times article leads to another article complaining about the dearth of new music by British composers being played by British orchestras. Welcome to the club. But seeing the names of composers offered, can it be any wonder? David Sawer is all right, but I sure won't be running to hear any George Benjamin.
There is a new small CD shop in downtown Ann Arbor. Underground Sounds is in the basement mini-mall beneath the Afternoon Delight restaurant, on Liberty. The store is mostly aiming at the college-age market, but I saw a few things to appeal to geezers like me: used 10,000 Maniacs CDs and new stuff from The Waco Brothers, for example. The store is probably half the square footage of Schoolkids-in-the-Basement. ---------- E-mail this morning announced the death of Jim Lindsey, the proprietor of Wazoo Records in East Lansing. I don't know what the connection is with the Ann Arbor Wazoo Records; the East Lansing version of Wazoo was the oldest used record store in town, well established when I arrived in 1975. Jim had a strong bias for 60s-70s bands and that's usually what was playing in the store -- Jefferson Airplane was a favorite, and he introduced me to Savoy Brown. He was pretty much the only staff I ever saw in the store, so I wonder what its future will be.
One more Ann Arbor CD store has folded. While down on South University for Art Fair today, I saw an empty storefront where The Record Exchange used to be. Staff at Ulrich's said the music store had closed within the last few days. I was only at this shoppe two or three times; it sold a mix of new and used discs, had no detectable folk section, and in general was aimed at a younger audience than me. This was the last CD shop in the student-oriented South University area, which previously hosted Tower and Michigan Where House Records. I've been mourning the loss of the wonderful CD clearance tables which used to dominate my Art Fair spending. Schoolkids, Where House, and Tower would put hundreds of slow-selling CDs out on sidewalk tables during art fair, with prices between ten dollars all the way down to maybe two dollars. You could be rewarded for your digging by real gems. Even the sad-sack Discount Records might have something worthwhile -- their street tables were dominated by rubbish like no-name, unknown-label classical compilations. In today's trip to the art fair I saw no CD clearance tables anywhere.
Last I was in East Lansing, I asked in the Wazoo on GR if they were related to the Ann Arbor store of the same name; the man working the register hesitated a moment but said they were not. I'd noticed a couple days ago that Record Exchange seemed to have shut down; although the sign said it was well within their operating hours and there were people inside, there was a "CLOSED" sign on the door. They'd cut back hours and (I think) people recently; my guess is they're another casualty of the disgustingly high rents in town. I haven't bought new cds in years; almost everything I listen to I can get at Encore or Wazoo! for half what they'd cost new.
Record Exchange never did anything for me. I'd shop there for convenience's sake when I lived on Hill, but I never liked it much.
I'll miss Record Exchange. On occasion, I'd find some really cool stuff in their $1 areas. I once found 3 Christine Lavin CDs there, as well as some CDs by D'Cuckoo, Throbbing Gristle and The Arrogant Worms. I also picked up several soundtracks there.
Any store with 3 Christine Lavin CDs - heck, any store with one Christine Lavin CD - is a good store.
same goes for Throbbing Gristle
Detroit retailer Harmony House, which almost closed a year or so ago and then revived with just its classical store and its flagship store both on Woodward, appears done. I have a web chat board rumor that what is left of the operation has been sold to somebody called Trans World. In Google's cache, I found the Harmony House web page from Sept 27 which announces the Classical store is closing, giving no details. The Harmony House web page isn't responding any more. As I mentioned when HH first started to liquidate: the classical CD shop in Royal Oak was world class, a really good resource. I regret a little that we never visited it during its one year reprieve.
I was never at this Royal Oak store, but I've only seen one really world-class classical CD shop in the entire history of classical CDs, i.e. one which measured up to the best LP stores in the LP era. It's Classical Millennium in Portland, Oregon, and it was still alive and thriving when I last visited, a year ago.
I've pretty much given up on buying cd's now, most of the money goes to the RIAA, so i just buy vinyl now, i've found it to be relatively cheaper than cd's and u get better quality, now i have a large collection of vinyl, the best part about it is that ure alloud to remix it as a dj.
The Borders store in downtown Ann Arbor just whacked the square-footage devoted to CD by maybe 30-40%. Classical music got chopped by about 50%; the classical music room is now shared with jazz and a few other things. The stock was not pruned by that amount, as the shelving has been replaced with new racks which store CDs all the way down to the floor. This may use space more efficiently, but it means that browsers have to drop down to their knees a lot. Some of us are getting to an age where we don't really want to do that just for shopping fun. My initial reaction is that the CD area is a really unpleasant space to be in now; I expect the time I spend in idle CD browsing at Borders to cut way back. But then, Borders and I have been falling out for a while. Borders has been doing an increasingly poor job of stocking the CDs I want, even when they are USA-distributed discs on labels that Borders has historically stocked, and as a result very little of my CD spending goes into Ann Arbor shops any more. I think everything I have bought in the last three months came from Internet mail order, or from a trip to Tower Records in Manhattan. In party, Richard reminded me that this was roughly what Virgin Megastores did when they axed the classical room and cut the world music section to expand DVD space. ((There's another piece to be written about the impending death of the USA world music scene, but that's for another item.))
I fell out of Borders a long time ago.
Underground Sounds, the small CD shop on Liberty in Ann Arbor, has moved above ground. I haven't checked their stock in about 18 months; they seemed to be aiming for a younger customer than me. Still, this is the first sign of growth in downtown CD retailing in quite a few years.
You have several choices: