Totally! I moved down here in '97 and they were still in the basement - my mind was blown that there was a store dedicated to rock books & mags. I loved that place, to put it mildly. And yeah - they had lots of weird porn as well!
There is a lot of available retail space here in Brooklyn Heights and in Dumbo. Considering the younger age slant of a lot of the residents (especially in Dumbo) and the tourist trade, a good record store somewhere in the area seems like a no brainer. I really don't get the Rockefeller center location at all, and I can't imagine that hot new indie band from London or the Midwest playing the freakin' Rainbow Room.
I lived within walking distance of Rough Trade from the day it opened until last year and while I went there often, mostly to kill a few minutes, I rarely bought anything. There were never more than a few other customers present, giving the place a depressing, grave-like stillness. Apart from the concert venue, which was fine for its size and had some good shows, the record store seemed like a vanity project, a small-scale attempt to create the feel of a bygone era for no good business reason. On a few occasions I went to buy a new release on release day, in a desperate attempt to recapture that nostalgiac feeling, and was thwarted every time since they never had what I was looking for in stock. Truth is records are cheaper from Amazon and new releases were delivered earlier. Regardless, I suppose someday I will start to feel nostalgia for Rough Trade itself.
The venue was better than "fine for its size" and had some great shows---both paid and free. Rough Trade carried a lot of titles that other local stores did not and having accessibility to those records will be missed. People who buy records from Amazon don't care about record stores.
Agreed. Not all people who buy records from Amazon care about record stores - true - but I would say that most people care about record stores also buy from Amazon. Hey, I like to support my local stores too, but there's no way I'm buying very many new records at a physical local store, because I can't return them when 1 out of every 5/6 needs to be returned for some kind of significant flaw. Record stores get better margins on the used stuff anyway.
Of course not, but without inane assertions of the attitudes and beliefs of millions of people one has never met, this forum would be a ghost town, too.
No, but that hot new indie band may film their performance on The Tonight Show or Late Night inside Rough Trade.
Of course it's true. If you walk into a record store and decide that you can buy the records cheaper on Amazon, then you don't care about the existence of brick and mortar record stores.
And every single person who buys off Amazon does that? Don’t talk utter nonsense, that’s up there with the other forum favourite that every single Discogs seller is a rip-off merchant.
I think it closed in the early 2000s - I live around the corner and remember it. So many of the Villages little music shops have closed in recent years.
The location really added to the sense you were seeing stuff you didn't see everywhere. Secret information. And when they first opened it really was stuff you didn't really see other places. I remember way back in like 1989 or something, MTV News did a story on 'zines and they went to See Hear. I was in there after they did the interview and overheard the the guy complaining that they asked dumb questions like "what's a zine." But they were asking questions like that because they knew a lot of their viewers didn't know.
I know think the 1990s- early 2000s were the peak of musi buying in NYC- You had the Big 4- Tower, Virgin, HMV, and J&R-there was Record Explosion and stores like the Wiz and Circuit City, Best Buy finally opened here , Sam Goody was still holding on, the East and West Village both had tons of little shops that sold imports and ahem..."grey market" CDs . Even Borders in the World Trade Center had a decent CD selection We didn't know how good we had it !
Yeah it was good at that point. You could buy bootlegs in one tiny shop, used in another, mainstream in yet more. The Virgin imports section was HUGE. And J&R had a great jazz level. If you felt it, and wanted it, it was there. An impulse music buying dream. The amount of music sitting on shelves on one tiny island - pretty insane. So ironic how I also recall the big launch of the iPod in 2001 at J&R. That was the beginning of the end.
The three that I walk out of with the most LPs in my bag are the Jazz Record Center -- I've never gotten out of there for less than $300 -- Generation and Captured Tracks.
Good times indeed. I worked at the HMV on 72nd and Broadway from 1993-1996. On Sundays after the Upper West Siders had read the NY Times and been to brunch, they flooded the store. If an album or box set was reviewed in the NYT it would almost always sell out. Even with Tower Records in roughly the same neighborhood it was packed.
Although in this case, RT are moving in order to pay more in rent, not less.....or am I missing something?