All you need is love ... and a record player. —Luca Gerb, author
By Randyl Drummer and Jelena Schulz
Vinyl records survived radio, eight-track tapes, CDs and the advent of streaming music. They might have just passed their biggest test yet: outlasting both a pandemic that closed stores and a factory fire that disrupted supply for the industry.
New and used record stores represent so-called nonessential businesses, but they still have drawn long lines when they've been able to open their doors during the pandemic. Sales during the health crisis for the first time outpaced CDs since the mid-1980s, when Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna ruled the charts. This comes on the back of a movement led by shopowners who opened hundreds of new and used record stores over the past decade.
Vinyl's comeback is more than the result of feel-good or hipster nostalgia. It's a testament to the durability of the medium's sound. The resurgence also may offer a peek at the kind of retailers that can thrive as economies reopen and people start to get out again, eager to touch and feel and hear products that can best be enjoyed in physical spaces.
"A store has sticking power when people go there to browse with no intention to buy any specific one thing, they're just there to discover," said James Cook, director of retail research for brokerage JLL. "Anyone in the world can stream the Beatles' entire catalog over their phone, but I think everyone has a need for the 'wow factor' of a good treasure hunt."
From flipping through dusty store bins to the anticipation of taking a favorite record home, smelling the vinyl and carefully dropping the needle onto the first track, the mechanical ritual of buying and listening to records hasn't changed in over a century.
Going to a favorite record store involves the treasure-hunt feeling that more discount retailers selling all types of merchandise have been adopting to get buyers to visit stores rather than shop online. With records, it can be a form of urban time travel and adventure that was clearly missed by fans of Amoeba Music, one of the last independent record store chains still open in the digital era.
The pandemic forced the chain, founded in 1990 by former employees of the hippie-era Rasputin Records, to close its stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley, California. Amoeba also had to delay the opening of its new L.A. store on Hollywood Boulevard, which was to replace its iconic Sunset Strip location, just weeks after it signed one of L.A.'s biggest retail leases of early 2020.
More than a year later, music fans responded by waiting for hours in lines that stretched for blocks when Amoeba held the grand opening for the new store on the ground floor of the El Centro apartments at 6200 Hollywood Blvd.
"A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine a large landlord leasing to a record store," said Mike Jordan, research director for Chicago-based ShopCore Properties, which owns about 20 million square feet of community and grocery-anchored shopping centers across the United States. "Now, they’re a solid mom-and-pop business to have in your tenant mix."
Small Stores Scratched
David Bernal said customers are back this spring after government orders forced him to close his two record stores for most of last year.
"Everyone was locked up, and now, there's a ton of federal stimulus and other money circulating and people are eager to spend it," said Bernal, owner of Palm Springs Vinyl Records and Redlands Vinyl Records & Collectibles in Southern California's Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Bernal was able to negotiate rent deferrals, but some used vinyl shops that were already struggling before the pandemic with high rent and labor costs and low margins will never reopen, Bernal said.
"I've been very fortunate. I have wonderful landlords, but unfortunately, a lot of people don’t," he said.
Vinyl sales are up as the number of stores selling recorded music declines. The United States had just over 2,000 record stores as of February 2021, a 6% drop from the prior year and down 57% from more than 4,670 stores counted in 2011, according to market research firm IBISWorld. CoStar's tenant database shows 1,940 retailers listed under the government's industry classification as "record/prerecorded tape" businesses.
Even though many record shops were closed in the pandemic, fans left with little entertainment except for watching videos and listening to LP records and other music drove the highest vinyl sales last year in more than a generation as fans bought records online and by mail order.
More than 27.5 million LP records sold in 2020, the 15th straight year of gradually increasing sales and the biggest annual jump since 1991, according to music sales data provider MRC Data, formerly Nielsen SoundScan.
Industry analysts attribute part of vinyl's comeback to Record Store Day, a series of promotional events launched a decade ago by shop owners, independent labels and artists. Exclusive new albums and reissues by Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, the Beatles and Queen highlighted last year's Record Store Day promotions, and this year's events scheduled for June 12 and July 17 include vinyl drops by artists such as Pearl Jam, Elton John and U2.
Owners of record shops struggling to open their doors saw limited profits from the boom. Online retailers such as Discogs, Amazon and Best Buy, however, sold records faster than manufacturers could press them.
The vinyl shortage has created its own boom for the few record-making plants that are left. The number of record-pressing operations dwindled from hundreds at the height of the disco era in the 1970s to as few as a dozen 10 years ago.
Those operations are running almost around the clock to fill a backlog of demand as a result of pandemic delays and a fire in Southern California last year that leveled North America's only major manufacturer of the blank lacquer discs used to press vinyl.
Record Shop Reboot
The era of big music store chains ended around the turn of the millennium, as Tower Records, Virgin Megastore, Sam Goody and other retailers disappeared one by one, doomed by competition from Best Buy, Walmart and the advent of online file sharing and downloads.
However, the long lines at Amoeba Music in April suggest that the pent-up yearning for browsing at record and bookstores and listening to live music could provide a lifeline for independent shop owners and help re-energize shopping districts where traffic slowed to a trickle during the pandemic over the past year.
"Record stores are the type of businesses that will help downtown and suburban retail come back," ShopCore's Jordan said. "Millennials and the younger generation as well as older fans like the sound, the experience of putting a record on a turntable, flipping it over, looking at the album covers and artwork."
Some operators are trying to capitalize on the opportunity, including iconic names such as Amoeba Music and Nashville, Tennessee's Ernest Tubb Record Shop, one of the oldest record stores in the United States.
Richmond is interested in possibly opening new stores or pop-up shops and hosting more live performances as tourists return to Music City.
"This shop has survived civil rights sit-ins, tornadoes and a global pandemic that almost destroyed us," Richmond said. "Sadly, it likely has destroyed many others in our industry."
Ernest Tubb, one of country music's pioneers, opened his first store at 720 Commerce St. in Nashville in 1947 to spotlight records and live performances by western swing and honky-tonk artists. Four years later, the business moved to its current location, a three-story brick building at 417 Broadway near the famed Ryman Auditorium, best known as the home of the Grand Ole Opry stage concerts from 1943 to 1974.
Even if singers and pickers were talented and lucky enough to land a record contract, they often didn't have a way to get their records out to fans in country music's early era, Richmond said.
Tubb's shop was also among the first mail-order outlets for records, a business that during the pandemic helped the shop survive, Richmond said. Ernest Tubb's store also hosted the Midnite Jamboree, a weekly radio broadcast that featured Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and a young Elvis Presley.
The area surrounding Tubb's store, known locally as Lower Broad, gradually changed from a somewhat seedy collection of pawn shops, dive bars, sex shops and pornographic movie theaters into a glitzy, four-block, historic tourist district packed with restaurants, museums and live music venues hosted by country stars.
"It was sketchy down here," Richmond said. "I don't know how many venues are on these four blocks now, but we were the very first place in the area to have live music. There aren't many places left where you can buy records and listen to artists perform at the same time."
The transformation has boosted commercial real estate values in Music City. Nashville businessman Jesse Lee Jones, owner of Robert's Western World, last summer bought the building housing the record store for $4.75 million. Former owner David McCormick paid just $128,000 for the 0.08-acre parcel in 1992, according to CoStar and public records.
Tubb at one point had six record stores, mostly between Texas and Tennessee. Richmond hopes to expand the business into a chain again and possibly move the Midnite Jamboree performances from the Texas Troubadour Theatre back to the record shop as the original store approaches its 75th anniversary next year.
"We'd like to see it happen again, to have more stores, to have pop-up shops," said Richmond, who has a real estate background. "We've only had one or two live performances since the pandemic, but the plan is to bring more performances back on a select basis with the more established country artists."
There's reason to believe the new demand won't fade away when the pandemic does, said Bernal.
"This is not a fad or a phase. It’s a 100-year-old technology that has stood the test of time," he said.