Tower Records Is History: Liquidation Sale Starts Today

[stopbush]

Tower Records to be liquidated

By Chris Morris

Tower Records has played its last tune.

On Friday, after a 29-hour auction, most of the bankrupt music retailer's assets were sold to liquidation firm Great American Group, which bid $134.3 million. The company outbid Albany, N.Y.-based retailer Trans World Entertainment by a mere $500,000.

According to Tower attorney Peter Gurfein, Great American was set to begin liquidation and going-out-of-business sales Saturday.

An internal e-mail to employees from Tower CEO Joseph D'Amico said the company's Web operation, Tower.com, its label 33rd Street Records and its real estate holdings were sold separately.

The sale sounded a bitter final bar for Tower, which operated 89 U.S. stores. Once the dominant music retailer in the country, the 46-year-old company attracted consumers to its spacious stores with flashy merchandising and a focus on deep catalog in a breadth of musical categories. Its store on Hollywood's Sunset Strip was a legendary music-biz hangout. But Tower's fortunes waned in the late '90s as severe price competition from big-box merchants, the growth of Internet sales, piracy and some ill-advised international expansion eroded sales.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003221956

[Missy M]

1. Sad to see yet another company go under due to....

big box stores and technology. It seems the little guy doesn't have a chance in this country anymore.

[MercutioATC]

2. Point taken, but Tower Records was hardly a "little guy".

...just sayin'...

[stopbush]

3. Tower was hardly a "little guy."

In it's heyday, Tower put a lot of mom-n-pop stores out of business. Looks like what goes around comes around.

Tower was being propped up by the record labels for a very long time through an incentuous arrangement that allowed
Tower to stock deep inventory while not paying the labels in a timely manner. The labels went along with it because they
could trumpet that they had shipped tons of product. But shipping product isn't the same as selling product. After a new release's
sales started to cool, Tower would ship the product back and get full credit to use against purchasing even newer product. All bigger
record stores do this, but Tower was so huge that it reached a point of diminishing returns where they owed the labels so much that
the labels finally had to stop shipping them new product at all.

As a classical music lover I appreciated Tower's commitment to stocking deep repertoire. But the truth is that I have moved probably
99% of my music purchasing to the internet. I was in our local Tower about 5 months ago and bought a single CD, but their stock
was a shadow of what it used to be. The business model for selling music product has changed. Why pay for employees when you
can stock a few copies in a warehouse and allow the consumer to do the searching through your website?

What Tower provided in its heyday was a place where like-minded people could meet and discuss music. I remember when Tower first
opened in NYC. You could hit the Lincoln Center or Village store and run into any number of musicians and music lovers in their classical
departments and have a half-hour conversation. There was a communal feeling to it that was unique. That doesn't seem to be a priority
in our "isolated on my computer" age.

The end of an era...and the start of a new world.

[1932]

7. It was a big box store for records that took out smaller stores.

But it did start from nothing in Sacramento, by a Berkely graduate, which is nice.

[Greyhound]

4. The price you pay for resisting inevitable change.

I stopped going to Tower about the time the CD became ubiquitous. They abandoned the practices that made them, in favor corporate looting (charging double the price while their actual costs were dramatically reduced). The good news is that Amoeba is filling the void they left behind.

[Goat or Panic]

8. Amoeba gets it

Creating a culture around the music and making it affordable. Going to miss hitting the 4th street Tower store in NY.

Shame.

[NEOBuckeye]

10. This will also be the fate of Wal-Mart and Big Oil n/t

[msongs]

5. many fond memories of tower on the sunset strip.... nt

[brentspeak]

6. Many CD outlets are closing shop

Unfortunate. I like CDs; the sound quality of lossy iTunes-type vendors leaves a lot to be desired.

[Greyhound]

11. A progression of degradation. First you lose a little converting from

analog to digital, then you lose a little more recording digital directly, than you compress the digital data resulting in even greater loss of fidelity, so that now we have "advanced" to the point that we have the privilege of paying $1 a tune for low-fi crap with no manufacturing costs at all, and most don't know the difference.

Did you also notice how they slipped the non-issue of file sharing in? One of the worst mis-calculations in history.

[newburgh]

12. Same thing happening in photography industry

quality is not there before they squeeze out the benchmark of quality- silver-based film. Digital doesn't act like film, doesn't look like film. It's made up of evenly spaced pixels while film is made up of clumping grains of silver halide. In a culture of junk, appreciation for quality disintegrates...:cry:

[Greyhound]

13. Can you imagine Ansel Adams, for one, creating his work in this

pixelated, 16 shades of gray, medium? Is there anything that isn't turning to shit?:cry:

[Arugula Latte]

9. Wow. Tower was a big name in my youth.

Weird to see it go bye bye.

[Ksec]

14. Im sure WalMart will step in and take their place

more minimum wage jobs added...whoopee