Chapter 1, Part 1
What Happened to Tower Records?
“What happened to Tower Records?” This is the question that set me off on a six-year quest to understand a broad but intangible force that is rapidly transforming every part of the economy and our society. The question was put to me by a group of businessmen in Los Angeles in 2008. And though they were asking me about the demise of record shops in general, their question referred specifically to that iconic temple to pop music. I thought I knew the answer. However, what I learned changed my perspective on everything from television to health care, automobiles, startups, and education.
The old Tower Records shop on Sunset Boulevard was a Los Angeles institution, if there can be such a thing in LA’s shaggy, laid-back cultural landscape. For thirty-six years the shop dominated one end of the Sunset Strip, walking distance from the Whisky a Go Go and Roxy nightclubs. Angelenos considered it the most famous record store in the world. In fact, celebrity sightings were so common that few shoppers made a fuss when they bumped into a movie star or performer in the aisles. The list of bands that played at the Tower Records shop ranged wildly, from Engelbert Humperdinck to Duran Duran to Mariah Carey. Legend has it that Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose started out as a sales clerk there — and that he once challenged Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil to a fight in the parking lot. It was more than a record store; it was a fixture in LA’s pop music scene. If the music industry had a hub, it was the Sunset Strip — and Tower Records was the anchor tenant.
But in 2006 it disappeared. After a long struggle on the brink of bankruptcy, the Tower Records chain closed up shops one by one until none were left. The famous marquee on the Sunset Boulevard location displayed a forlorn message borrowed from an REM lyric: “It’s the end of the world as we know it. Thanks for your loyalty.”
It wasn’t just Tower Records. Rival music shops The Wherehouse and Sam Goody vanished one by one too, until there were only a handful of indie record shops left in all of Los Angeles. In the city where making hit entertainment for mass consumption is not just a cool career but the defining cultural lifestyle, these stores were contemporary landmarks. Their disappearance left a gaping void in the commercial landscape. Where did they go?
My answer was simple: “They got vaporized.” Disintegrated. Zap. Gone in a puff of smoke, like a scene from a science fiction movie in which laser guns are used in battle.
It may sound like exaggeration but, figuratively speaking, that’s exactly what happened. Not only did the Tower Records store vanish, so did the products it sold. Vinyl records, cassette tapes, and compact disks (CDs) were replaced by MP3s. And the music playback devices also disappeared. No more turntables, cassette decks, or boom boxes. An entire industry, its primary and secondary products, and most of its retail outlets were mostly gone within the span of five years.
Physical media, the CDs and tapes that lined shelves at homes across the country, were suddenly out of style. They became slightly embarrassing artifacts of a bygone era, like bell-bottom jeans stuffed in the back of the closet or a photo of your parents in their disco days. Today the CDs and digital video disks (DVDs) we find at flea markets remind us awkwardly that we no longer have devices to play them.
The Digital Wave
The process that killed music retailers is now rippling across society like a seismic wave, reshaping one industry after another. We’ve entered a period in which more and more devices, products, companies, jobs, and stores will simply disappear forever to be replaced by invisible software. As consumers, we won’t miss them much. We no longer want superfluous physical products cluttering up our lives. We don’t miss standing in line at a shop. If we can get the job done with a digital version on our computers or smartphones, or by borrowing instead of buying, we’re satisfied. We’ve lost the urge to collect tangible goods.
Substitution is just the beginning. As physical products are replaced by their digital counterparts, a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs have begun to reimagine them entirely, turning them into apps and services with far greater flexibility and functionality, available at any time, in any context, on any device, for free or for a radically reduced price. After two or three rounds of this reinvention merry-go-round, the next-generation products are nearly unrecognizable when compared to their forerunners from the 1990s.
In music, to continue with our example, we’ve switched from the shiny compact disk to “rip, burn, mix” to rampant file sharing to legal downloads to Internet radio and subscription streaming-audio services — all in a fifteen-year span. We consume music in 2015 in ways that were unthinkable in 1999.
Image Credit: Tower Records Sunset by Mike Dillon (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This post is an excerpt from Vaporized by Robert Tercek.
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