As some of you are probably aware, Tower Records is closing all of its stores forever and liquidating its stock during the next few weeks. The company filed for Chapter 11 in late August, 2 years after initially declaring bankruptcy. The company was auctioned off to the Great American Group, an "asset stripper" that is bringing the record chain to rapid closure. The story:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=2538125
So be advised that your nearest Tower Records store probably has (or will have) some good-to-excellent sales on CDs and other goods over the next few weeks. Probably some bargains on swing/jazz CDs and box sets that you might want to pick up. But don't delay, the good stuff is sure to go quickly, and the local Tower manager says he thinks most stores will be closed by Thanksgiving.
For me, those final big bargains are the only consolation to losing one of my all-time favorite stores for browsing for music of all kinds. Several years ago, back when I was first turning away from neo-swing and beginning to spin the classic styles of swing, jazz and blues, I would peruse the Tower racks to see what I should be adding to my collection and playlists. (I would actually read the old SwingDJs Yahoo Group, jot down the names of artists, tracks and CDs being discussed, and then go to Tower and other stores to hunt for those recordings.) Many of the Chronological Classics, Hep and Ace/Kent CDs and Proper Box Sets in my collection came from Tower.
Their prices were never very good, and nowadays most of my CD purchases are from Ebay Stores, Amazon and CDBaby, but I'll still miss the opportunity to peruse the stores and make new discoveries in their racks. (I'm especially sad that I'll never make it to the legendary New Orleans Tower store.)
Change is inevitable, and in the age of on-line sales and downloading (legal and otherewise), the brick-and-mortar stores dedicated exclusively to music sales were doomed. But I'm still gonna miss them.
Bottom line, go check out the sales, if you get a chance, in the last days of Tower.
The End of Tower Records
Moderators: Mr Awesomer, JesseMiner, CafeSavoy
My two favorite record stores in college were Poo-Bah's (local Pasadena shop) and Tower. Pretty much the first record store I ever went to in LA was the original Tower Records on the Sunset Strip and I remember boggling at the ENORMOUS number of CDs (compared to most stores back then). I used to buy most of my music there because Tower was a few dollars cheaper than other record chains, but then I discovered Poo-bah's, and then a decade later Amoeba came along...
Amoeba seems to thrive because it is a shop for the music geek, a peculiar kind of music lover who has to own a physical copy of the music with liner notes and album art and thrive on poring over endless thousands of square feet of space in the hopes of scoring some rarity or long-forgotten beloved album.
Tower was too corporate, too impersonal, but they were the Amoeba of their time.
Amoeba seems to thrive because it is a shop for the music geek, a peculiar kind of music lover who has to own a physical copy of the music with liner notes and album art and thrive on poring over endless thousands of square feet of space in the hopes of scoring some rarity or long-forgotten beloved album.
Tower was too corporate, too impersonal, but they were the Amoeba of their time.
You didn't use Canterbury's?julius wrote:My two favorite record stores in college were Poo-Bah's (local Pasadena shop) and Tower.
Tower was too corporate, too impersonal, but they were the Amoeba of their time.
Tower was ice cold and I never liked it. I tried a few of their stores.
I wish more people could have shopped Sam Goody's in it's heyday. It was the store that all the other chains copied, but even by the mid to late 70s, they were starting to slide.
There have been several Tower threads on various forums. Some people simply don't care or are glad they are gone. Others are really singing the blues.