TheFranciscos.Net

Today is a sad day for music… I just read on MSNBC that Tower Records announced recently that they were liquidating their assets and going out of business. This doesn’t come as a surprise though – their prices haven’t been competitive for years now. Shops like Best Buy, Circuit City, and even Walmart have been bringing CD prices down to rock-bottom. A B&M with mostly only CDs and DVDs to sell simply can’t compete with that. Still, none of them even come close to having the selection that Tower had. I used to go to the Tower branch in downtown Philadelphia whenever I had the time (or when I was bored with work) during my days working at First Union. There was also the branch right across the street in King Of Prussia that I used to frequent. More recently, I was working on a project in Nashville a few months ago, and right across my hotel was a Tower store that I visited whenever I could. Many nights (not to mention many dollars) were spent browsing CDs and DVDs in those aisles. This was a sanctuary to me where I relieved stress and depressurize after a long, hard day. Besides the vast selection of domestically produced CDs, it also had a wide array of imported CDs that no other store (at least the B&M sort) came close to. The people who worked there also seemed like they loved what they were doing. They were always knowledgable with music (any kind), and were genuinely friendly. I’ll always have fond memories of Tower Records.

So what can we do as a replacement now? Well, there’s always the internet. This is how I’ve been buying most of my CDs lately anyway since I haven’t lived near a Tower Records in years. There’s a couple of stores like SirenCD, Duffelbag, GEMM, SecondSpin and even Amazon and Ebay to fulfill my CD addiction needs. Still, internet shopping doesn’t and will never have the same sense of instant gratification that you can only get at a regular B&M store, but it will have to do.

Long live Tower Records! I’ll drink a beer (or six) in your memory tonight.

I wonder what this will do to Tower branches outside the US like the ones in Japan and the Philippines? I think those are franchises, so they’ll most likely stay open, but I wonder if they’ll be keeping the Tower Records brand?