What Happened to Tower Records? The Store Where America Bought Its Music

In 1995, more than a thousand people lined up on the Sunset Strip for an autograph from Elton John. Not at a concert. At a record store. Tower Records started with a 16-year-old selling used jukebox records out of his father's drugstore in Sacramento in 1941. By 1999 it had more than 200 stores on four continents and a billion dollars a year in sales. By the end of 2006, every Tower Records in the United States was gone. Everybody blames Napster. But the trouble started four years earlier, in the aisles of Best Buy, and with a decision to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars at the worst possible moment. And in Tokyo, the Tower Records that was sold off to raise cash never closed. CHAPTERS 0:00 A line around the block for a record store 2:17 A drugstore in Sacramento 3:19 The jukebox records 4:42 Carry everything 6:19 San Francisco, open till midnight 7:21 The corner of Sunset and Horn 9:39 Friday night at Tower 10:31 No dress code, no script 11:53 Tower goes global 12:37 The CD gold rush 13:52 The peak of the record business 14:36 Before Napster: the big boxes 16:00 Betting big at the worst moment 16:53 Napster 18:06 The iPod and the 99 cent song 19:34 Two bankruptcies 20:16 Everything must go 21:16 Russ Solomon after Tower 22:40 What actually killed Tower Records 23:33 The Tower that never closed 24:27 Record Store Day and the vinyl comeback SOURCES Tower Records and Russell Solomon histories; LAist (Sunset Strip store); Rolling Stone and The Washington Post (Russ Solomon, 2018); The Japan Times (Tower Records Japan, 2002); RIAA (US recorded music revenue 1999 and 2007; vinyl vs CD, 2020); Salon (big-box CD pricing, 2000); All Things Must Pass (dir. Colin Hanks, 2015). . Archive stills are public domain, CC0 or CC BY / CC BY-SA, credited to their authors. #AmericanObsolete #TowerRecords #MusicHistory