Record Theatre.....
Oct. 3rd, 2006 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1While driving home, NPR's "All Things Considered" had a feature on the impending demise of the Tower Records chain. Many brick-and-mortar music stores are losing sales, or in some cases, closing. Why is this happening? Some blame the industry for discontinuing singles and charging high prices. Some blame the internet for online merchants and downloading.
As I as listening, my mind flashed back to my youth, and how I loved to go record shopping. While I did most of my record shopping at Twin Fair (a local discount merchandiser comprable to Value City, Gold Circle, K-Mart, Target, Wal-Mart, et al), I'd occasionally hop the #8 bus and go downtown to Record Theatre, against my parents' wishes. (They were afraid I'd get robbed.)
Record Theatre was a record buyer's paradise. The store -- at the corner of Main St. and Lafayette Ave. in Buffalo -- was the size of a medium-sized supermarket. What they had in stock was immense. From rock to blues to classical to R&B to soul, they had it all. On one shopping trip, I must have spent at least 3-4 hours there, looking through the record racks, and coming home with about $50 worth of albums. This was a lot of money for a 15-year old who worked a paper route.
They opened up another location several years later, in the University Plaza. By then, I was going to college, and the store was within walking distance of the campus. While I don't remember the trips there as vividly as the ones I took by bus, I enjoyed shopping at that location as well. It was in the basement level of an old department store. While the square footage may have been smaller than the original store, the selection was just as huge.
Now, vinyl is all but gone. There may be a few boutique stores which specialize in vinyl albums and singles, but everything is either on CD or is downloadable nowadays. And I can do my searching from the seat at my computer. Somehow, that takes all the adventure out of finding a favored group's latest album, or a rare imported album.
I don't even know if the main store is still open. It's been years since I was last there, and in town.
And what are my vinyl albums worth these days? I'd be lucky if I got $1 apiece for them. I thought about thinning my collection as I replaced them with CDs, hanging on to the ones that were special to me, like the copy of Styx's "Paradise Theatre" with the laser etched design on side 2, or Yes's "Going For The One" with the triple fold-out cover that I used as a gamemaster screen. That's one problem with the CD format -- the album art has been shrunk to a quarter of its original size, and the lyrics are in smaller type, which makes them harder to read.
As I as listening, my mind flashed back to my youth, and how I loved to go record shopping. While I did most of my record shopping at Twin Fair (a local discount merchandiser comprable to Value City, Gold Circle, K-Mart, Target, Wal-Mart, et al), I'd occasionally hop the #8 bus and go downtown to Record Theatre, against my parents' wishes. (They were afraid I'd get robbed.)
Record Theatre was a record buyer's paradise. The store -- at the corner of Main St. and Lafayette Ave. in Buffalo -- was the size of a medium-sized supermarket. What they had in stock was immense. From rock to blues to classical to R&B to soul, they had it all. On one shopping trip, I must have spent at least 3-4 hours there, looking through the record racks, and coming home with about $50 worth of albums. This was a lot of money for a 15-year old who worked a paper route.
They opened up another location several years later, in the University Plaza. By then, I was going to college, and the store was within walking distance of the campus. While I don't remember the trips there as vividly as the ones I took by bus, I enjoyed shopping at that location as well. It was in the basement level of an old department store. While the square footage may have been smaller than the original store, the selection was just as huge.
Now, vinyl is all but gone. There may be a few boutique stores which specialize in vinyl albums and singles, but everything is either on CD or is downloadable nowadays. And I can do my searching from the seat at my computer. Somehow, that takes all the adventure out of finding a favored group's latest album, or a rare imported album.
I don't even know if the main store is still open. It's been years since I was last there, and in town.
And what are my vinyl albums worth these days? I'd be lucky if I got $1 apiece for them. I thought about thinning my collection as I replaced them with CDs, hanging on to the ones that were special to me, like the copy of Styx's "Paradise Theatre" with the laser etched design on side 2, or Yes's "Going For The One" with the triple fold-out cover that I used as a gamemaster screen. That's one problem with the CD format -- the album art has been shrunk to a quarter of its original size, and the lyrics are in smaller type, which makes them harder to read.
