Free Record Shop

» see freerecordshop.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hans Breukhoven left secondary school, trained as a steward and spent two and a half years working as a host on Holland America Line ships. On 15 October 1971 he opened a record shop on the Broersveld in Schiedam. He named it Free Record Shop because he would not join the Dutch record sellers' trade association.

It grew into the default place a Dutch or Belgian teenager bought music. By 2008 there were 182 shops in the Netherlands and 66 in Belgium. The group also owned the vanLeest chain and the GameMania game shops, plus an Amsterdam flagship store called FAME, and it ran online stores under all of those names. In March 2008 it sold its Norwegian and Finnish operations to GameStop to concentrate on the Benelux.

The hedge against downloads was to stop selling only music. CDs gave way to DVDs and then to games and consoles, and the chain turned into a general home entertainment retailer that happened to have started with records. That worked while the discs themselves still mattered.

Then that stopped being true too. In January 2012 the company licensed its websites to ECI Nederland to run, which is the move of a retailer that has decided the internet is somebody else's job. Breukhoven stepped down as chief executive the same year.

~ the case file ~

~ why it was called free ~

I never stood in one of these. The nearest Turkish equivalent to what Free Record Shop did was a different kind of shop entirely, the ones around Tünel and Kadıköy that sold cassettes and then CDs, and I was not really buying either by the time I had money for them. Between roughly 2002 and 2005 I was in internet cafes pulling MP3s down, which is the exact behavior that emptied these places. I was not a customer who left. I was never a customer, and that is the more honest version.

The name was a position rather than a slogan. Breukhoven would not join the Dutch record sellers' trade association, and calling the shop Free said so above the door. For about thirty years being the outsider held up fine against other shops. By 2008 there were 248 of them across two countries.

~ dying twice ~

On 24 May 2013 staff were told the company had filed, and a Rotterdam court accepted the bankruptcy on 28 May. The chain restarted in August 2013 with 47 Dutch stores and 230 employees under the investment firm ProCures, which then could not reach terms with the receiver. The Belgian business went down separately in November 2013 and closed its doors for good early in 2014.

A month before the end, management tried converting what was left into an outlet format. On 22 April 2014 a court declared Fresh Entertainment Nederland, the company holding the Dutch stores, bankrupt. The 36 remaining shops closed and 90 people lost their jobs, 55 full-time and 35 part-time. Three shops in Luxembourg stayed open under separate ownership, trading under a name whose owner no longer existed.

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