Tower Records, Sam Goody, and HMV: The Cathedrals of Music We'll Never Get Back
They smelled like plastic and carpet and possibility. The great music retail stores were more than shops — they were the places music actually lived.
Walk in off the street and the first thing that hit you was the scale of it. Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles was 8,000 square feet of music. HMV’s Oxford Street flagship in London spread across multiple floors, each one dedicated to a format or genre, with staircases connecting them and the sound of whatever was playing at each level spilling into the others. These were not shops in the casual sense. They were destinations. You went there with time to spend, not an errand to run.
The great music retail stores of the 1980s and 90s occupied a specific role in the cultural ecosystem that had no real equivalent before or after. They were the physical place where music accumulated — where everything released was theoretically findable, where you could discover something you didn’t know you were looking for, where the boundary between consumer and participant in music culture was genuinely thin.
Tower Records: The Flagship and the Philosophy
Russ Solomon opened the first Tower Records in Sacramento, California in 1960, in a corner of his father’s drugstore. The name came from the Tower Theatre next door. By the time the chain reached its peak in the late 1990s, Tower operated more than 200 stores across the US, Japan, Ireland, the UK, and several other countries. The Sunset Strip store, which had opened in 1971, was considered by many to be the most important record shop in the world, not because of what it stocked — though it stocked everything — but because of who went there.
The music industry ran through Tower in a way that was understood by everyone inside it. Labels used in-store placement as a marketing tool. A new release positioned prominently at the front of Tower Sunset was a statement about priority. A listening station featuring an album — those booths where you could put on a pair of headphones and sample whatever was loaded — was a form of promotion as deliberate as a radio playlist. Record company representatives worked the floors, ensuring their releases were visible. The shop was saturated with industry attention, and somehow that made it feel more alive rather than less genuine.
The staff knew things. This was not incidental. Tower, and the better independent stores, hired people who had strong opinions about music and expressed them. Browsing the racks, you might overhear a conversation between two staff members about the new release that had arrived that morning — whether it was better than the previous album, whether the production was wrong, whether the B-side on the limited edition was worth the extra price. This was a form of information that no algorithm could replicate because it was not neutral. It had a perspective, sometimes a wrong one, and you could argue back.
The HMV Experience
His Master’s Voice — the HMV chain — had different origins and a different character. The brand dated to the early twentieth century and a painting of a dog listening to a gramophone. By the 1990s, HMV operated over 300 stores in the UK and had expanded into Ireland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. Its flagship Oxford Street store, which occupied the building it had been in since 1921, was the model for what a flagship music retailer should look like.
HMV was less countercultural than Tower. It was more corporate, more organised, less romantically chaotic. But it was also more accessible — a place you could go whether you were buying a mainstream chart record or something more obscure. The classical section was large enough to be genuinely useful. The jazz section had depth. And crucially, HMV had the imports — the section that stocked pressings not officially released in the UK, the regional editions, the Japanese limited versions with the extra tracks that didn’t appear on the domestic release.
The import section was where serious buyers went first. A Japanese pressing of a David Bowie album might cost £20 where the British version cost £8. Whether it sounded better was debatable; what was not debatable was that owning it meant something. The import was a mark of dedication, of having gone further than the average buyer, of knowing enough to want it.
New Release Fridays
In the UK, new releases arrived on Mondays. In the US, for most of the 20th century, they arrived on Tuesdays. Whatever the day in your territory, it was a ritual. The shop would look different on new release day — the staff would have spent the morning stickering and shelving. The front tables and the new releases section would have been completely reset. The queue at the counter would be longer than usual.
If something mattered to you enough — an album you’d been anticipating for months, a follow-up from a favourite artist — you went on release day. Going later in the week meant the copies at the front of the rack would be the ones other people had handled, pulled out and looked at and replaced. The first copies were always cleaner. This was probably irrational. You did it anyway.
Tower Records Sunset held genuine release-day events for major albums. Guns N’ Roses. Michael Jackson. Prince. These were not in-store performances so much as gatherings — people arriving at midnight for a new release, waiting with other people who also cared deeply about the same artist, sharing a few hours of anticipation before the doors opened and the thing finally became real.
The Knowledgeable Clerk
The shop assistant in a serious music store occupied a peculiar cultural position: someone who knew more than you, knew they knew more than you, and might tell you — with varying degrees of grace — what you were doing wrong. The character has been satirised, most affectionately in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity (1995) and its subsequent film adaptation, but the satire contained genuine observation.
The best version of the music shop clerk was transformative. A good one could take what you half-described — “I want something like that album you were playing twenty minutes ago, kind of atmospheric, not too slow” — and produce three suggestions, each one defensible, one of them perfect. They were curators before curation became a technology job title. They operated on the assumption that music mattered enough to have opinions about, and they shared those opinions whether or not you asked.
The worst version — and it existed — was a gatekeeping snobbery that made browsing feel like an examination. Placing a mainstream pop record on the counter in a shop staffed by people who only respected independent music was an experience that could make a perfectly reasonable purchase feel mildly embarrassing. Nick Hornby understood this too.
The Collapse
Napster launched in 1999. The music industry’s response — litigation, denial, delay — failed to address the underlying reality that music was becoming digital and distribution was becoming irrelevant. By 2001, CD sales were declining for the first time since the format’s introduction. The fall was steep and it did not reverse.
Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2004, was sold to a private equity firm, and filed again in 2006. The stores were liquidated. HMV survived longer — it was a more diversified retailer, carrying games, electronics, DVDs — but it entered administration in 2013, was briefly rescued, then entered administration again in 2018. The Oxford Street flagship eventually closed in 2019, ending nearly a century of continuous operation.
Sam Goody, the American chain that had been part of the retail landscape since 1951, was absorbed into a declining parent company and essentially ceased to exist as a meaningful entity in the early 2000s. Its parent, Musicland, filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
What the Shop Actually Was
What streaming replaced was the convenience of the music retail shop — the ability to access any music you could name, to browse catalogues, to find new things. And streaming replaced those functions so thoroughly that there is genuinely no argument for the shop on efficiency grounds.
But efficiency was never really the point. The shop was a place where music was the primary subject. A place where everyone in it had come specifically to engage with music — to buy it, to look at it, to talk about it, to overhear other people talking about it. The ambient conversation in a record shop was a form of education that happened without anyone trying to teach anything.
What the great music retail stores provided was a shared physical space where caring about music was normal. Walking into Tower or HMV or a good independent, you were surrounded by people for whom music was important enough to leave their houses for. That community — diffuse, largely unspoken, made up of strangers who would never speak to each other — is not something that can be reconstructed algorithmically. It required a building, and the buildings are mostly gone.