Other Music NYC to close...

And they both should have packed it in long before OM.

 

Very sad news. I've discovered so much great music there over the years. It is definitely my favorite music shop in NYC.

 

Good mathematical analysis and you may be right. But in the old days there was usually a line, there were often two cash registers being manned and people usually bought multiple items. They had an on-line business in recent years.

Anyway, the business model doesn't work anymore. Very sad.

I'll miss you Other Music.

 

There was an excellent article in the Village Voice a few years ago that discussed the rent issue in NYC. They interviewed a mom & pop liquor store owner who refused to be run out of town by the high rents. He said that he was there to serve the neighborhood while many of the chain stores who moved in were just there as advertising or a tax write off. Very few of them made money or supported the people.

 

Yup, I'm still slightly stunned that 'the food thing' has become a new cultural norm. Don't get me wrong, back in the day me and my buds would get some cheap Szechuan food before seeing a few bands, but it's a different world now. Seems like the restaurant angle has yet to peak here and in other cities -- it's like there's an entire generation that forgot how to cook and loves to spend their paychecks (or trust funds, ha) on over-priced pretentious food. And I still had no trouble finding a bar even in the bad old days.....

 

According to today's NY Times:
Other Music's rent in 1995 was $6,000 a month, it has now more than doubled, and their share of the building's property tax has gone up.
In 2000, they did $3 million in sales, now they do half that.
Expenses rising and profits falling, what are you gonna do?

 

Never did succeed at that one

 

NYC??? It's America baby...coast to coast.Homogenization of the entire nation. Even in my podunk part of the country it's the same. Our brains have been mismanaged with great skill... Bob knows. There is a better way,seek the better way.

 

They needed to sell more used, as I stated earlier here, you can't make it on selling predominantly new product, the margin isn't there.

 

I'm sure they would have if they had the space. More used would have meant less new, less esoteric, which is what they were all about to begin with.

 

Yes, it was a small space, and being novel meant something when there were mainstream stores, as those fell, Other Music needed to be wider interest with a different knowledge base, knowing how and what to value. NYC should be diverse enough to pull out the esoteric from collections coming in. They also weren't that novel anymore as any of their customers could have ordered from Forced Exposure just as the store did.

 

I can't work out how everyone is managing to eat so much food!

I saw the same trend in London and Toronto has always been a restaurant town but it's bigger than it has ever been here. It seems that only new "stores" that open up are ones the serve food. I was saying to a friend of mine, ironically over dinner, that people don't seem to be interested in buying stuff these days and are more interested in "experiences" which feeds the restaurant industry (my guess anyway).

One problem with the proliferation of restaurants and bars is that they can drive rents up which means more bars and restaurants open rather than a decent shop you can buy something you actually need in.

 

I wonder if that really would've stopped the inevitable. One thing I noticed is that some stores were well placed based on the way the neighbourhood was when they first opened up. Then the neighbourhood changes, your customers visit less because they moved/have other options/whatever and they can't survive anymore. Perhaps Other Music should've moved to a different area?

A local store, Rotate This, recently relocated and one comment they made at the time was that the area they were in had changed a lot over the 20 years they were there. The location they chose made more sense as there's more of a record buying crowd in the area.

 

The only problem is rent. No matter where they went, I'm sure the rent would have been just as much as or more than what they were paying.

 

How does this gentrification cycle take root and eradicate the life and soul of a unique, beloved local neighborhood?
I cannot pretend to know the exact reason....and can only guess from general knowledge.

I am aware of some development areas successfully requiring The Landlords to allow and maintain "mixed use occupancy" buildings.
This means if a new construction is city permitted to be built, there is a government mandate that a certain percentage of units are for "senior citizens", "retail establishments", "rental", "short term lease", "long term lease", etc.

My best guess is this starts with city council meetings? Calls, emails, and letters to local politicians? Need help here...

Pertinent to this thread, there should be allowance for "legacy" or "neighborhood" businesses... Like our beloved record stores.

 

In L.A. we have Amoeba and so much more, lots of small indie record shops. I feel very lucky to live there speaking as a music collector, and I write this from my old hometown of NYC where I'm sad to hear if these latest closings. At least there are still a couple of other Greenwich Village shops, but they lack ant character, just boxes loaded with inventory. Academy Records on 18th Street is a bit more interesting and I plan to stop by while I'm in town, I found some good used stuff there last year. As others have stated, there's more to be found in Brooklyn. Obvious negatives aside, walking around Williamsburg feels a lot like what the Village was like back in the 70's and 80's, though it too is always changing and no doubt will one day be as sad as the Village is today.

 

New York real estate is the wild west these days. Set asides for seniors or low income families are miniscule compared to the amount of buildings that are going up. As an example, my dentist has his office across the street from the Barclays Center on Atlantic Avenue. There is so much construction going on that the cranes look like sci-fi predatory birds preying on the neighborhood. The great majority of people and businesses are being priced out.
It's about getting big bucks now, not creating "legacy" businesses, or affordable housing.

 

Ummm, NO

 

I think they'd long passed their expiration date. For a few years, they were an indispensable store, selling stuff that was really difficult to find anywhere else (talking about brick and mortar). But as time went on, and people both got less interested in physical media and relied on them less for direction, the writing was on the wall.

The other issue was that their snarky elitism got old. In order to survive - which was definitely possible - they needed to make a major attitude adjustment and that never happened.

 

You got that right.

 

I said "feels a lot like", not "is like". Of course no other place will be "just like" the Village back then, but various areas in Brooklyn do evoke some of the spirit and feel of GV back in the day. I'll take that over having nothing but my memories.

 

"....allowed landlords to pass the [property tax] increase along to tenants"

 

It's not about what's fair, it's about what you can get away with.

 

I used to shop at a now closed store in the Midwest during the 90s and early 2000s that modeled itself somewhat after OM. The reason the store was great was because it wasn't like other record stores. Even back then, it was easy enough for a customer to order direct from FE and the store wasn't exactly hiding the fact that FE was where a lot of the stock came from (they also ordered from other distros). The reason I chose to shop at this store instead of doing orders through FE was that FE, then as now, does not have a real time stock inventory system, and the few times over the years I've tried to order from them I receive an email 2 weeks later telling me that they can't ship the item I want. Another reason was the knowledgeable staff, something that is sorely missing from every record store I've been to in the last couple of years.

I learned so much from shopping at this store that I just could not have figured out on my own, even with books and the internet. The shop I'm talking about got hit hard by things like P2P, being forced to change locations due to rent going up, etc. Even if they had stuck around long enough for the vinyl revival I doubt they would've made it very long because the store owners just weren't interested into pandering to what customers that shop at stores now want, which is either top 40 pop music, Pitchfork's flavor of the month, or bog standard classic rock.