The Tower Falls

"The fat lady has sung.... and she was off key," or so Russ Solomon, founder of Tower Records, said in an e-mail to his employees across the nation earlier this week. It came on the heels of the announcement that the record store chain was closing its doors for good after declaring bankruptcy again back in August and a continued slowdown in sales. As of the end of the year, all 89 locations across the nation will be closing their doors for good and the record store landscape will no longer have bright red and yellow bags being toted here and there.

I feel sad since Tower Records was one of the spots my brother and I would make at least once a summer. We lived far enough away from the one in Rockville to make it an occasional trip. We would load up every time we did go thanks to the wealth of CDs and genres available at the store. As a classical music and soundtrack fiend, I was overjoyed at the abundance of selections that they had at the store. After moving out, I moved to Tysons where I was within walking distance and my parents moved to within a ten minute drive of the Rockville location.

Although my brother and I didn't go on those occasional splurging trips, we made numerous shorter trips during which we would pick up a few things here and there. For fans of musical soundtracks and the like, Tower was a great place because it carried such a wide variety of selections, you could almost be assured that whatever title you might be looking for could be there; and if it wasn't they'd be able to get it for you in short order. They had tons of foreign releases too. On occasion I do listen to non-soundtracks and it was great to find some rare albums by artists I am somewhat fanatical about. In all, there were very few times when I walked out of Tower Records disappointed.

Then the iPod came around. The iPod really changed the face of music and although Apple hasn't had any major successes within the realm of general personal computing, the iPod is probably the one thing that has generated more money for the company than anything else. Almost overnight, the MP3 industry went from being the realm of nerds to the realm of anyone who liked music. There had been long-standing debates over the legality of 'ripping' music and putting it on the internet but it had never really completely died away. Suddenly everyone was looking to get in on the fun and record labels, artists and online retailers were struggling to catch up.

Why shell out $15 for a new album when you can download the songs you want for less than that? Why carry around tons of CDs when you can carry around just as much music, if not more, on something no larger than a Zippo lighter? Within a short time, it was as if no one needed to buy CDs anymore. For a company that specialized in selling CDs, that was a bit hard to deal with. Tower Records tried valiantly. They offered similar services, and promoted internet sales too. But with the sudden surge in sales at bulk retailers like Wal-Mart and Target, it became more difficult to keep up with the industry and sales began to falter. This latest bankruptcy filing was a delaying tactic.

There was hope that someone would purchase the company before and keep it afloat through the upcoming holiday shopping season; typically the store's best time of year. Unfortunately that's not the case. It seems that by the end of the year, we will no longer see Tower Records anywhere and their large stores will stand empty. It makes me sad in a way because I begin to wonder, how much longer it will be before we stop seeing CDs all together. I plan on making a few last runs to the store, for old times sake.