![]() ![]() Way too high.Īs part of a 2002 settlement with 41 states over CD price fixing Tower Records, along with retailers Musicland and Trans World Entertainment, agreed to pay a $3 million fine. In UK we were paying up to £15 for a CD in the early 90s. Firstly, the price of CDs was way too high. I've always thought record shops are a natural home for live music, even if its a solo acoustic gig.īut although they had expanded all through the 90s, this was all only going one way. Because of the store's proximity to Music Row, country music stars could occasionally be seen performing or shopping there. The location was famous for their late-night Monday events that culminated at midnight on Tuesday when staff started ringing up sales of new releases. The strip mall next door contained a separate Tower Books. The area in the back housed videocassette sales and rentals, PC and console games and music paraphernalia. The old showroom floor in front was devoted to CDs, cassettes and vinyl. The Nashville location on West End Avenue (across from Vanderbilt University) was in a former Packard dealership. If memory serves they were often by the likes of the Guess Who, Elephants Memory, Ohio Players and Crabby Appleton. We often used to get 'cut offs' in the UK, records from America that were massively discounted and had the corners cut. I love a clearance annex because you'd find all sorts of goodies for a few cents. There was also a location in the basement of Trump Tower, and a small clearance annex on 86th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Their location on the Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center on 66th Street and Broadway, was a magnet for those working in the field of musical theatre. The third store, Tower Video, was located on the southeast corner of East 4th and Lafayette Street, and specialized in video and the second floor of this location also sold books. The Tower Records Annex was in the same building, located at the southwest corner of East 4th and Lafayette Street. The main store was located at the southeast corner of East 4th Street and Broadway. In New York City, Tower Records operated a suite of stores on and near lower Broadway in the East Village. It felt like you were at the axis of something important. They never caught on in the UK and soon, the racks were just full of CDs in plastic jewel cases.Įven so, hanging out at that Tower Records on Sunset was, to a boy from the cold, windy islands of the UK, a fabulously glamorous thing to do. It was that ‘long box’ format, which was developed purely to allow CDs to sit in the racks in the way vinyl records once did. However, the last album I bought there was Joe Satriani’s ‘The Extremist’ in 1993. I have fond memories of shopping there during our many trips to LA. Arguably the most famous Tower Records outlet was the purpose built building which opened in 1971 on the north west corner of Sunset Boulevard and Horn Avenue in West Hollywood. ![]() The Tower Records stores in Japan split off from the main chain and are now independent. The chain eventually expanded internationally to include stores in Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ireland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina. The following year, Sapporo Store, the first in Japan, opened. In 1979, Tower Records in Japan started its business as the Japan Branch of MTS Incorporated. Seven years after its founding, Tower Records expanded to San Francisco, opening a store in what was originally a grocery store at Bay Street and Columbus Avenue. By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to another Sacramento Tower Records location. The first stand-alone Tower Records store was located at 2514 Watt Ave in Arden Arcade, a suburb of Sacramento, California. He named it for his father's drugstore, which shared a building and name with the Tower Theatre, where Solomon first started selling records. In 1960, Russell Solomon opened the first Tower Records store on Broadway, in Sacramento, California. ![]()
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