Actually, that store never even started carrying CDs when they were first on the market. It is primarily a store for 45 RPMs, with some LPs. But I do agree with you....I am "old school" with 100,000 LPs, but I love CDs.
This sign was from 2011. I suspect the absolute numbers are off, but the trend and percentages are probably correct. "About" 1,884? I don't think anyone knows. I know of no complete inventory, and a record store is hard to define for such a listing.
This looks like Orpheus after they moved from M Street in Georgetown, Wash DC to Arlington Va. Used to go there occasionally, but hardly ever bought anything, he priced his stock way too high. Still, brings back nice memories.
I have not been there since 1993, but I do remember serious over-pricing. Do such stores not understand that most record collectors are smart about pricing (maybe not about putting their money in a bank)
Inbought many CDs at arvthat Arlington location. And many LPs in Georgetown before the moved. When they could afford the rent in Arlington, they closed instead of moving again I think the rent forced them to over price. In the 70s and 80s, they were cheap in Georgetown. They also had albums that were hard to find anywhere else. Georgetown got to hot for them and they moved to Clarendon right before it boomed. CD prices weren’t bad in Clarendon, at least when they first opened. By that time I wasn’t buying LPs.
Good to see this thread back after it went into hibernation for a while. Here's a record store sign that I can be ABSOLUTELY certain hasn't appeared in the thread before, because I would have noticed: The sign is still there, but unfortunately the store is LONG gone. That neighborhood (the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco) just wasn't the right to support a foreign language book/magazine/record store. Here's another photo:
I love record shops that specialize in one or a few nationalities. One of my favorites was the Russian store in NYC (Soviet sanctioned) called Victor Kamkin's (long out of business) It was in the famous Flatiron Building. Ground floor, right side in this image
Many records in my collection from this store. Rasputins was a good store nearby, too. Better days...
Obituaries Russ Solomon, Tower Records founder who created a mecca for music lovers, dies at 92 Harrison Smith March 5 at 9:44 PM Email the author Russ Solomon, whose company Tower Records helped invent the music megastore but was felled by the rise of digital downloads and growing competition from discount chains, died March 4 at his home in Sacramento. He was 92. He was watching the Academy Awards and had just asked his wife “if she would go pour him a whiskey” when he apparently suffered a heart attack, said his son Michael Solomon. A high school dropout who made his first album sale at 16, dealing used jukebox records out of his father’s California drugstore, Mr. Solomon built a music empire that sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores. Founded in 1960, Tower Records boasted more than $1 billion in annual sales, employing a strategy of low prices and a dizzying selection that kept audiophiles busy for hours. Under the direction of Mr. Solomon, known to some music industry observers as “King Solomon,” its stores modeled themselves after supermarkets, piling items on the floor and keeping their doors open until midnight in the era before the Internet made any song available at any time. “Taking your date to Tower Records has become an institution,” CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff told the New York Times in 1987, “and it’s cheap if you don’t buy too many records.” in 2015. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom and pop record stores. . . . Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.” Employees such as Dave Grohl, who went on to become the drummer for Nirvana and frontman for the Foo Fighters, venerated Mr. Solomon, who wore jeans to the office and invited visiting executives to “donate” their neckties to a collage of cravats he kept outside his office. But while Mr. Solomon’s ambition helped grow the business into a juggernaut — his competitor Barry Bergman once quipped that Mr. Solomon had “the guts of a river boat gambler” — it also contributed to his undoing. His company took on $110 million in debt to finance its global expansion, and by the turn of the millennium faced competition from big-box stores such as Best Buy and digital file-sharing services including Napster. “The whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday,” Mr. Solomon said in a 1994 promotional video. “But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection — and our CD inventory, for that matter — it’s going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.” Ten years later, Tower Records’ parent company MTS Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection, after closing many of its stores and struggling to find a buyer. It seemed to recover before filing for bankruptcy a second time in 2006 and going out of business later that year. “The fat lady has sung,” Mr. Solomon wrote in an email to employees. “She was off-key. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.” Russell Malcolm Solomon was born in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1925. His mother worked as a bookkeeper for his father, and the family moved around California until his father started a pharmacy in Sacramento, inside the city’s Tower movie theater. The building gave Mr. Solomon’s company its name. He studied photography in art school before serving as a radar technician in the Army during World War II, and later worked as a “rack jobber,” stocking store shelves with vinyl records, until going broke in 1960. With a $5,000 loan from his father, he responded by opening his first Tower Records location in Sacramento. Eight years later, he expanded to San Francisco, then the epicenter of American rock music, with a 6,000-square-foot store that was reportedly the nation’s largest. A Los Angeles outpost on the Sunset Strip followed in 1970, and a decade later, Tower had megastores in Manhattan and in London’s Piccadilly Circus shopping district. His marriage to Doris Epstein ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of eight years, Patti Drosins, and two sons from his first marriage, Michael Solomon and David Solomon, all of Sacramento; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Mr. Solomon largely devoted himself to photography after Tower’s demise, exhibiting portraits of Sacramento artists whose work he had collected over the decades. But he also remained attached to music, and for a several years ran a Sacramento record store. His taste in music, Michael Solomon said, was as wide-ranging as that of his employees at Tower. “His own contemporaries would think the Beatles were madness,” he said, “but he loved it.”
That is a very cool site. Look through the many photos and read the viewer comments. look at the photos in enlarged high res....
