Tower Records

[homer9600]

The saddest thing for me is that I have no reason to make the trip to Stamford anymore.

Not even to call in at Mosaic Records?

Well, if they had a retail store......

[robviti]

The saddest thing for me is that I have no reason to make the trip to Stamford anymore.

Not even to call in at Mosaic Records?

Well, if they had a retail store......

if effect they do. i've purchased several sets from them in stamford while on my way to nyc.

[homer9600]

The saddest thing for me is that I have no reason to make the trip to Stamford anymore.

Not even to call in at Mosaic Records?

Well, if they had a retail store......

if effect they do. i've purchased several sets from them in stamford while on my way to nyc.

Road Trip!

[sidewinder]

I have to say that I'm glad that Mosaic Records isn't within car distance from me. If it was I'd now be doing a 'Tower Records'.

[trane_fanatic]

The Dallas Tower has already commenced its liquidation sale. However, at this point it is a very modest sale--only 10% off of CDs and DVDs.

Same thing at the store on Market in SF. I'll have to check the other SF stores next weekend (is the Stonestown one any good? How about the one down in Mountain View?)

I went to the one in Stonestown yesterday. 10% off all CDs (I think all Towers are starting at that point first) and 30% off 'zines. Not nearly enough to start spending yet. FWIW, the CompUSA store downstairs is also going OOB after it replaced the Good Guys franchise that shut down.

Leopold's, Wherehouse, Sam Goody's, Musicland, Tower... all gone. Only big chains left are Virgin Megastore and FYE. None are gonna be in Baghdad-By-The-Bay. It's all about the indies... Streetlight, Rasputin's, Amoeba.

Edited October 8, 2006 by trane_fanatic

[J Larsen]

From what I have heard, all Tower Record stores everywhere will be liquidated, which seems kind of crazy. I really think the Manhattan and SF stores in particular could survive, and perhaps they will be converted to some other record chain. But like most people here, I found them too expensive with too few sales to justify going in on a regular basis (and the Chicago stores were never really anything to write home about).

I've been in the 4th & BWay Tower at least once a week every day since early 2000 (it's very near my apartment). There is no way in hell they have been making their rent (probably around $75,000/month) the last few years. In the late 90s, there was always a line at the checkout counter. The last few years, there have been an average of about 10 people shopping in the store when I go in.

[7/4]

From what I have heard, all Tower Record stores everywhere will be liquidated, which seems kind of crazy. I really think the Manhattan and SF stores in particular could survive, and perhaps they will be converted to some other record chain. But like most people here, I found them too expensive with too few sales to justify going in on a regular basis (and the Chicago stores were never really anything to write home about).

I've been in the 4th & BWay Tower at least once a week every day since early 2000 (it's very near my apartment). There is no way in hell they have been making their rent (probably around $75,000/month) the last few years. In the late 90s, there was always a line at the checkout counter. The last few years, there have been an average of about 10 people shopping in the store when I go in.

Yep. The last few times I was there, I think I was the only person wandering around the Classical and Jazz depts.

[J Larsen]

Yeah, and now that I've been thinking about it, $75,000 is an EXTREMELY low estimate for their rent. I know two people who own restaurants in the area, both are a tiny fraction of the size of Tower and in prime but not quite as prime locations. One pays $20,000/month, the other pays $35,000/month; both signed their leases in 1999 or 2000. And, of course, the tiny CBGB space, which isn't in nearly as good of a location, is going on the market for around $30,000. It's hard for me to guess how much they are paying for that space, but on further reflection I would think it is well into the six figures. I'm actually a little curious... maybe I'll look into the bankruptcy documents if I get bored at work tomorrow...

Part of what killed the 4th and BWay location is that it was largely dependent on sales to NYU kids, who of course belong to the download demographic big-time.

[LAL]

The Tower Records chain in Malaysia, which is not owned by Tower US but a franchise by a local, is continuing its operations. According to the guy at the jazz/classical section, the main reason they are still in business is because it's basically a front for the other highly lucrative "business" of the franchise-owner, namely pirating of music and movie discs (mostly Asian stuff).

Meanwhile, I've been happily picking up some titles at big discounts - these have been sitting on the aisles for at least 8-9 years. Btw - the jazz department is also largely deserted even during peak hours for Tower.

[jasonguthartz]

Are they saying a going out of business sale starts TOMORROW?

The liquidation sale started this weekend, apparently at 10% off all stock - but expect that discount to increase over the coming weeks:

"Great American Group is deploying representatives to Tower's 89 stores to facilitate the liquidation, which is expected to last about six weeks, said [GAP president Andy] Gumaer, who used to shop at Tower."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-...1,6919218.story

[tjluke68]

I remember in the late 80s/early 90s when I was late teens/early 20s, going to Tower Records in Philly. I was into more alternative music at that time (Japan/David Sylvian, Ministry, Thrill Kill Kult, Siouxsie, etc) and always finding some interesting titles or imports there.

Now, I hit the Tower by Lincoln Center once-in-a-blue-moon to see what they have, but the prices are just too much - after tax, almost $20 for some re-issues. I worked in the music biz for 5 years (in marketing) so I hate to see them close.

Maybe it's inenvitable considering the state of music, but I think the judge should've gone with Trans World, considering all the jobs lost, potential revenue stream and his gavel hammering another nail in the coffin of the music industry...

[Jim R]

I happened to drive by the local store yesterday, and noticed all the "going out of business sale" signs. After a few years of decline there, very few decent sales, and the blossoming of a couple of good indie stores nearby, I haven't hung out there nearly as much, and I wasn't even tempted to go in. Sad, though, and hard to believe. I started shopping for LP's there when it opened, whenever that was... '73? '74?. I feel like I spent half my life in that place (and spent half the money I've ever had). Sigh...

[Aftab]

This is very sad to me personally.

When I moved to Green Bay from Seattle, one of things that I missed was my bi-weekly or so trip to Tower Records in Bellevue - a very cool 2 story store that had a pretty decent jazz section 3 years or so ago. I used to love to browse through those aisles and just check stuff out - if they had one Grant Green cd they had all of them. And when you'd hit a sale it was awesome - I stil have discs I haven't got too yet with a Tower Records $7.99 sticker on them (I'm slow, I know) The place even had its own smell as dumb as that sounds.

There's a decent B&N here, as well as a local chain that gets all the new jazz releases on release day (they have good prices too - RVGs - $9.99 all the time), but none of them compare to my memories of the Tower Stores in Bellevue and Seattle (that Seattle store is like a landmark!)

It's a bummer for sure.

[BeBop]

In Denver, there are several guys standing out on the street (39 degrees and raining) with sandwich boards - 30% off everything, or so it says. (I kept driving.)

[Chuck Nessa]

Shit happens. Life goes on.

I gave up on "serious" music stores a few years ago. I regret it but won't spend a lot of time mourning. A few valiant anachronisms survive and I praise them.

[rostasi]

I think...like many have said here...it's that damn ritual aspect.

You may not buy anything (or in my case - mostly magazines),

but there's the ritual that's sometimes tied into another activity

completely. Making that trip to a restaurant and 'round the corner

to Tower and driving back home around midnight on nearly deserted streets

with music as your driving companion.

Sometimes I just hate being mentally tied to this aspect - "ritual" being OK,

but regular or the "expected" ritual is a trait that I try to get rid of,

but it stays as if it's some kind of reoccurring fungus.

Let's have the surprise ritual!

So, I'm just looking at this as another ritual to drop.

Same thing when a favorite restaurant haunt changed hands

and the food, service, etc all deteriorated.

It's going, going, gone and habits are changed.

[Chuck Nessa]

As I said, shit happens.

[Tim McG]

Leopold's, Wherehouse, Sam Goody's, Musicland, Tower... all gone. Only big chains left are Virgin Megastore and FYE. None are gonna be in Baghdad-By-The-Bay. It's all about the indies... Streetlight, Rasputin's, Amoeba.

Streetlight is a great place to buy CDs.

BFrank likes Amoeba, but I have no experience there....but I understand the selection is nothing short of magnificent.

Rhino is another spot worth checking out too, IMHO.

[chris olivarez]

I used to shop at Tower's all the time. This is a sad day but I guess all things do change.

[robviti]

This appeared in Sunday's Boston Globe:

And in the end

Seeing record superstores disappear leaves one fan with bittersweet memories

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | October 22, 2006

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.

[tatifan]

This appeared in Sunday's Boston Globe:

And in the end

Seeing record superstores disappear leaves one fan with bittersweet memories

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff | October 22, 2006

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.

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.

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.

This seems to me like a really myopic reaction to Tower's demise. Sort of a "What Tower could have done for me, but didn't". Apparently only what she considers the only worthy genre and form of music is important to the industry and consumers. If all that's needed are the two "best" cuts from an album, her business model is already out there in the form of online download vendors.....while we're at it, just tell those silly bands to stop recording those other 10-12 crappy cuts, it clogs up my computer screen!

Good riddance? You mean good riddance to a good many of those very independent labels that have no place to sell their wares now. Don't these people realize that to say screw Tower is to screw one's self?

[Daniel A]

You mean good riddance to a good many of those very independent labels that have no place to sell their wares now.

There's the Internet, of course...

[Brad]

What a bunch of crap. Maybe it was the Clay Aikens of the world that subsidized their having some great and unusual and obscure Jazz records.

[tatifan]

You mean good riddance to a good many of those very independent labels that have no place to sell their wares now.

There's the Internet, of course...

Of course, that's the saving grace. But, it's still a big bite taken out of visibility for new releases, to go without the preorders from Tower, since the likes of, say Borders, are not going to carry full catalog, and usually just shove it in regular stock (and often don't even get things on the shelf by release day). It's harder to get the impact of new releases on the internet, it's a steadier trickle. I wonder if this is enough for many companies to survive? I'm not saying it's all Tower, of course, but it's a bigger loss than any other mega-chain to niche and independant labels.

[Adam]

Leopold's, Wherehouse, Sam Goody's, Musicland, Tower... all gone. Only big chains left are Virgin Megastore and FYE. None are gonna be in Baghdad-By-The-Bay. It's all about the indies... Streetlight, Rasputin's, Amoeba.

Streetlight is a great place to buy CDs.

BFrank likes Amoeba, but I have no experience there....but I understand the selection is nothing short of magnificent.

Rhino is another spot worth checking out too, IMHO.

Rhino closed several months ago.

The problem is that now Amoeba will have something approaching a monopoly. It's average prices are already going up.

[edited for spelling]

Edited October 23, 2006 by Adam