Tower Records

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

~ the obituary ~

Tower records sat in the part of american music retail i can read about but never walked into. The closest analog format in turkey was raks müzik and a handful of import shops, none of them at the scale of the sunset strip flagship. In ankara in the late 90s the cd-buying options came down to teknosa and a few small import counters near tunalı hilmi.

The original tower started in 1960 in sacramento when russ solomon began selling 45-rpm singles out of his father's drugstore. The chain expanded through california in the 1960s and 70s. Tokyo shibuya opened in 1981 and the manhattan flagship in 1983. At peak in the late 90s the company ran roughly 200 stores worldwide.

The us parent filed chapter 11 on august 20 2006. Great american group ran the liquidation through the fall. The last us stores closed on december 22 2006 with about 3,000 employees laid off in the final round. Tower japan had been a separate company since 2002 and survived intact, still operating in 2026 as one of the largest physical record retailers on earth.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

The model was deep catalog and long hours. Tower stayed open until midnight when most record shops closed at six. The import wall was the actual draw. You could find japan-only pressings and european releases the us labels did not carry. Cover prices were not the cheapest, and the catalog was what kept the long-haul fans walking in.

The sunset strip store was the cultural anchor on the us side, with elton john reportedly visiting every tuesday for the new-release shipment. On the japan side the shibuya tower was a seven-floor flagship at 5,000 square meters of selling space, which is still one of the largest record retail spaces ever built.

~ how it ended ~

Two filings, six years apart. Tower filed chapter 11 first in february 2004 over a debt overhang from the 1990s expansion and emerged after a restructuring. By then file-sharing had cratered cd unit sales for half a decade and the itunes store had launched the legal-download alternative on the same hardware most music buyers already owned. Amazon's cd pricing kept compressing the margin on the catalog tower depended on. The second filing came in august 2006 and the company did not emerge from it.

The brand has been relicensed twice since. An online-only revival shipped in 2020 under different ownership and the towerrecords.com domain is still live. It does not run physical stores in the us.

~ what came after ~

The death of tower closed a specific kind of weekend pattern american music buyers had built around the chain. You went to the store and came out two hours later with cds you had not planned on buying. The chain's last days were filmed for "all things must pass," colin hanks's 2015 documentary, which is the cleanest record of how the place ran from the inside.

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