Other Music

» see othermusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A record shop in Manhattan is not something I get to claim. Ankara had its own places to buy music and none of them were curated by people with strong opinions about the Japanese reissue market. What crossed the distance was the email. Other Music sent out a weekly list of new releases with a short staff review attached to each one, and that list got read in a lot of places nobody at 15 East 4th Street was ever going to ship a record to.

Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo opened the store in December 1995 with a third partner, Jeff Gibson, all of them off the music counter at Kim's Underground. They took a storefront on the same block as the Tower Records downtown store, which read at the time as either confidence or a death wish. Tower had four floors and every record in print. Other Music had one room and a couple of thousand titles somebody had chosen on purpose.

The bet was that the four floors were the problem. If you already knew what you wanted, Tower was better. If you did not, Tower was a warehouse and Other Music was a person telling you to try this one. That is the whole business model, it does not scale, and it worked for twenty years before it stopped.

Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006 and the store across the street closed. Other Music kept going for another decade, which is the detail people drop when they tell this as a small-shop-versus-chain fable. The chain died first. The shop died of rent.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

The in-stores are the famous part. Vampire Weekend and Neutral Milk Hotel both played the room, which held maybe a hundred people badly. Members of Animal Collective worked behind the counter. For about fifteen years the Other Music staff list was a reasonable predictor of who would be on a festival poster three years later.

The less famous part is that the shop was early online in a way most record stores were not. Mail order ran off the website from the late nineties. In January 2007 it started selling DRM-free MP3 downloads, ahead of the major labels and ahead of iTunes dropping its own copy protection. In 2012 it started a label with Fat Possum and put out records by Shintaro Sakamoto among others.

~ the day it died ~

Madell announced in May 2016 that the last day of business would be 25 June. The reasons he gave were rent and the industry, in that order. NoHo by then was not a neighborhood a small shop with a curatorial staff could pay for, and the customers who used to walk in for a recommendation were being handed recommendations by an algorithm for nothing.

The closing trended on social media for a day, which is an odd way for a record store to go, and then it was finished. The website is still up as an archive of the weekly emails, so the writing outlived the shelves. Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller had been filming the last months, and their documentary premiered at Tribeca in April 2019 under the store's name.

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