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Remember record stores? They mostly exist today as a novelty and an excuse for people to brag about their sound wave knowledge, but there is nothing like the feeling of popping your favorite record on. And from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, the record store was a music lover’s paradise.
Want to jump back in time? Take a look at these eight record stores that no longer exist today.
There’s probably no better place to start. Tower Records popped off in the ‘60s and made it over 40 years before it finally shut down. In Los Angeles, the chain’s Sunset Strip location was storied for its celebrity sightings (I hung out there constantly as a teenager, hoping to spot one) and its center-of-the-universe pulse. Many people give Tower credit for creating the concept of a music mega-store.
There's still a bit of hope, however, as Tower Records relaunched as an online retailer in 2020 and opened Tower Labs, a creative space in Brooklyn, in 2022. A handful of franchised locations still exist abroad, including Ireland, Japan, and Mexico.
At its peak popularity, there were more than 800 Sam Goody record stores across the country. In the early 2000s, after a respectable 50 year-run, the stores began to disappear. By 2006, most of the damage was done and Sam Goody was all but extinct.
Though Musicland is a little bit younger than Sam Goody, that didn’t stop it from rising far above it and buying the entire chain outright. In the late ‘70s, Sam Goody was absorbed by Musicland which helped them grow to over 1,300 stores. And ten years later, they expanded even further when they bought Suncoast Motion Picture Company. Unfortunately, Musicland didn’t make it out of the 2000s.
Camelot first started slinging records in Ohio in the mid ‘50s, but by the ‘90s was a full sensation with over 450 stores. It folded into the FYE brand in the early 2000s.
Richard Branson tried a whole lot of things with Virgin (I miss you, Virgin Domestic) and not all of them stuck. But for a while, Virgin Megastore was just as English and sleek and true to the brand as ever. The last one closed in 2009.
Harmony House first showed up in 1947 and nearly hit 40 stores in the Detroit area, but larger stores essentially worked them out of the competition by 2002. We miss the days of a friendly, local record chain.
Born in Durham, North Carolina in the ‘60s, Record Bar was able to open up more than 180 stores in the south and the midwest, but was acquired by a Belgian video distributor in 1989. Tale as old as time, ya know?
