Prominent touring artists often play intimate shows on the small fourth-floor stage, as Massive Attack and The Shins did in late 2017. The second floor sports a casual cafe and surprisingly robust English language books section. Every sign, rack, and counter has those particular shades of yellow and red.Įxcellent! What can we find here, or what should we look for? Most of the massive store's nine floors are dedicated to CDs and divided by genre. Just as in the Tower Records of yesteryear, new releases are wheeled out at midnight, and listening stations are sprinkled throughout the stacks. How’s the space? From an American point of view, visiting Tower Records in Shibuya is an excessively nostalgic experience. As one of the biggest CD retailers in the world today, there's no better place to experience this largely outmoded world of retail than Tower Records. Forbes found in 2014 that 85% of music sales in Japan comes from CDs, a figure largely resulting from strict digital licensing in the country. Built in 1995, it would later become the flagship store for Tower Records Japan, which became independent in 2002, a full four years before the American company liquidated. And the music stores still succeeding seem to have remembered a few things that Tower may have forgotten: a sense of discovery, a passionate staff - reasons to not go online.So, what’s this place about? The nine-story Tower Records in Shibuya is a behemoth. Crupnick points out that two-thirds of the music sold in this country is still on CD. You could almost say the same about the value of listening to music, Crupnick says: Often, it just plays like a soundtrack for lives lived before screens. "And arguably, as they went to about 90 stores, they lost that whole idea of being special." "They became very ordinary, in terms of their expansion plans," Crupnick says. And Crupnick says that, by the late 1990s, Tower Records was no longer a music lover's mecca. Young people stopped caring about liner notes and owning a physical product. "Folks would say, 'Well, wasn't this all about Napster?' And I'm like, 'Not so much as the fact that I think Tower just sort of lost relevancy,' " Crupnick says.īig-box stores undercut Tower in pricing CDs. But you can't necessarily attribute Tower's decline to the rise of digital music. By then, people were getting their music in very different ways. Those in-store performances were another thing that set Tower apart - and had mostly disappeared by the time the U.S. In fact, he says two of his personal milestones were seeing his poster up at Tower and playing his first in-store show. Hoge says the Nashville Tower staff pointed him to some of the classic country that shaped his own sound. "But then, you could also go and have these people really hip you to something that you'd never heard of." "You could go in and not be lambasted by the staff for wanting to buy a Christina Aguilera record or whatever it was that you needed," Hoge says. "It was a great way to discover new music." You know, English rock magazines," Hoge says. "That was the one place you could also buy rock magazines - the magazines you didn't see anywhere else. Musician Will Hoge says the Nashville Tower Records was like a cross between a music store and a public library. If it didn't have what you wanted, it could probably order it for you. It was Disneyland the first time I went in there," says Russ Crupnick, who analyzes music retail for a firm called NPD.īack in its heyday, Tower Records was renowned for its massive inventory: rock, jazz, classical, international.
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