Bye-Bye, Tower Records

Update, 08/21/06: At 12:00 last night, Tower Records has filed for bankruptcy. Rather than bad news, this might be good-ish news as buyers will now not have to take over all of Tower's liabilities. Allegedly, Tower is already talking to several interested parties. Liquidation is therefore unlikely, though most small stores will probably not survive. Tower DC, for all its problems, is an attractive enough store to make the cut - depending on the deal a potential new owner might offer. The sale of Tower is planned to be completed within the next 60 days. Meanwhile Tower Records has managed to negotiate with companies to receive (select) new releases. If anything interesting happens, I will post it here.

Tower Records, unless a deep-pocketed fairy swoops down to save it, will go out of business in a matter of weeks. With somewhere between 90 and 120 million USD owed to its major suppliers, WEA, Sony/BMG, EMI, and Universal have ceased to supply the Tower chain until bills are paid – which Tower announced it would (could) not. So far, no buyer has been found for the chain that has had recent financial problems and not managed to turn around, despite the DVD boom of the last few years. Given that Tower Records must be one of the most mismanaged companies in America, this does not come as a surprise – but it is sad news, nonetheless.

Among the leftovers that will survive should be the online part of Tower and possibly a handful of the most successful stores – three in New York, one on Sunset Blvd., and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Washington and Rockville stores (never mind Virginia's) might not be among them, loss-making as they are and have been. With Tower’s fall, we also witness the fall of the last retail store that carries a “deep-catalogue” section of classical music. Even if Tower’s classical departments in D.C. and Rockville have shrunk from a truly impressive, all-wishes-fulfilling size to slightly more modest dimensions, they still offer over 30,000 different titles and make ‘browsing’ a reality that that simply does not exist with on-line stores. Choosing between twenty different versions of each of Mahler’s symphonies or browsing a ludicrously large Pfitzner, Ries, and Raff section won’t be possible anymore. With Borders and Olssons’s having shrunk their classical sections to a pathetic two rows (why even bother), the only alternative at all in D.C. remains Melody Records, though they have perhaps a tenth of Tower’s stock.

Browsing in stores for classical music as opposed to looking on-line for classical music are two fundamentally different ways of shopping and being exposed to music. The qualitative difference of which may not be fully appreciated until a few years down the road, once Tower has become but a memory of the past. The breadth and depth of catalogue will be more difficult to support by even the smaller labels, simply because it is more likely to stumble upon a Schreker opera or Schoeck songs or Boehm organ works in a store than it is to do an Internet search for them. In light of the absence of brick & mortar stores, record guides such as Fanfare or American Record Guide will become more important, assuming they stay in business. Better still might be a service like the one offered by Bob McQuiston and his Classical Lost and Found. A bi-weekly newsletter highlights the latest in “great music by forgotten composers and forgotten music by great composers” – with audiophile recommendations thrown in to boot.

Until Tower goes out in a blaze, you might take advantage of its Harmonia Mundi sale, which lasts until the first week of September. A little guide to what is particularly enchanting among all the labels that this sale includes can be found here.