Spotted today in Los Angeles on Magnolia Blvd. near Cahuenga (within a mile or so of Universal Studios)... Naw, the store is not really back, but somebody is recreating the look and feel of Tower Records / Sunset from 1979, judging by the album covers displayed. I wonder if this could be for Quentin Tarantino's upcoming movie The Movie Critic, said to be about a very opinionated underground newspaper critic of that era... [Pic courtesy of Alison Martino, daughter of the great 1960s singer Al Martino, who herself is a historian of all things connected to LA.]
The Amazoning of America. I know it's not just because of online shopping, but that's what happens when we lose our B&M stores.
I don’t think it’s the Tarantino movie. They haven’t even finished casting let alone begun filming so it has to be something else.
Tower Records briefly appeared at the original Sunset Blvd. location for the Angelyne miniseries in October 2021. Back in 2010 I worked on the film version of Rock of Ages, we did a mash up of iconic Sunset Strip stores and clubs including Tower Records at our Miami location. The interior scenes were filmed elsewhere.
There's a whole documentary on why Tower Records collapsed. Founder/president Russ Solomon claimed it was because of interference from banks, investors, and overexpansion, but I think it was because there was a paradigm shift in the public's taste, and average people didn't want to buy music as physical media anymore. Of course, I still buy CDs, but that's me. Virgin Records, Blockbuster, Wherehouse Records, and many other concerns all also went under in the 2010's. That is possible -- for all I know, there's another rock-oriented 1979 film being worked on right now.
At the same time, we get what we ask for. Towards the end, most people I knew shopped Tower to browse, then actually bought their CDs from Amazon because they were $8 less per CD.
Record stores declined because of big box stores like Best Buy. And when Target became more prominent, they sold CDs as well, Wal-Mart matched flo0r space for their electronics and digital media. We lost stores because of them. Those that survived were the ones that embraced the internet. You can't blame the internet for record stores. It's actually what saved them. Had it not been for the internet, smaller stores never would have made it to the first Record Store Day. Before Discogs there was GEMM, the Global Electronic Music Marketplace. It gave smaller stores a space to sell throughout the world. So no, you're wrong. Every successful record store today relies on internet sales to supplement in-person transactions.
growing up in my home town, we had a Tower records and it was on Tower st. ...being a small town folk I grew up thinking it was just named that because that's what street it was on.
We had just two Towers Records locations here in Canada that I knew of, and both were in Toronto. The larger store was located on the northwest corner of Yonge and Queen streets, on the ground floor of the beautiful Jamieson Building (see photo below) and it closed in 2001. It had great stuff. It sat quite a hike (on foot) south of Yonge and Gould (where most other large music stores were located then), which sometimes made life hard in the winter; but music lovers made an effort to shop there anyway, plus it was next to one of Canada's largest shopping malls. I was never sure why it closed; it closed years before the US chain went under, so it wasn't the result of that.
Best Buy, et al, were around before, during, and after Tower died. I don't buy your argument. No, online buying is what killed brick and mortar.
And while brick and mortar in Japan has slowed, Tower remains vital there. It shows what a difference Japan and US markets are. People still value hard disc there and don't stream as much. Best news I heard was Tower in Shibuya expanded their classical offerings. That's the opposite of what I expected.
For a while there were Virgin Megastores in the US as well. They were expensive but had good deals on used cds. Found a number of rare promo cds there.
Note the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) logo on the back of this guy's jacket. So some new production needs a 1979 Tower store facade. Cool. Still, seeing the outside makes me want to go in and browse for a few hours!
That street and store position looks a lot like one of the 1980s-90s London Tower Records I used to visit, in Queensway for those who remember it. A lot smaller than the huge Piccadilly London one, but the Queensway branch was handy to visit on the way to walk or cycle to the then masses of used record traders in Portobello / Notting Hill up the Rd. And it had a very fine and inexpensive Italian ice-cream parlor nearby..
I've been to that one! I was walking around the city with my then girlfriend and randomly stumbled upon it. Had no idea it was there. I proceeded to spend several hours there, much to the disappointment of my girlfriend at the time. Notice how used the term "then girlfriend".....
Few people remember that in the late 1990s, Amazon sold only books, and another company -- CDNow -- was the biggest online mail-order CD distributor. I bought a ton of music via CDNow, especially when I wanted to reserve a forthcoming title weeks or months in advance, and CDNow was totally reliable. Imagine my surprise in July of 2000 when Bertelsmann Music Group bought the company for $100 million dollars, and then it was quickly absorbed by Amazon. So suddenly... Amazon was in the CD business, too. CDNow - Wikipedia I kind of felt guilty for buying so many CDs through CDNow -- throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I was spending at least $20,000-$25,000 a year just on CDs and music -- but I tried to also use Tower.com when they were a going concern. But Tower started coming up short and failing to deliver new titles on schedule, plus a bunch of record labels cut them off because they weren't paying their bills. The last few years of Tower Records was pretty awful...
Naw, look at the RIAA music sales figures. The total sales peaked around 2000, then went right off a cliff for 15 years. (Napster was a big factor as well.) The sad reality is that music today just doesn't have the importance for average people as it did for most of us in the 1980s and 1990s. Me, I'm glad to support songwriters and performers and pay for all the music I listen to. But I don't think average people (especially younger people) have that same mindset. I'd point to this book about the invention of the MP3 in the early 1990s and the eventual collapse of the music industry as being a pretty good cause & effect in terms of leading Tower Records and similar stores to go off the cliff: How Music Got Free (paperback and hardback) on Amazon I would love someday to make a big 2-hour dramatized/documentary based on this book, because it's an alarming, compelling, remarkable story. And I agree 100% with the author's conclusions. One can argue that there was a conspiracy of sorts to kill record stores, but I think the music labels were badly hurt by the shrapnel as well.
