The Fall of Tower

The collapse of Tower Records did not come as a surprise to me. I
was only surprised that it took so long.

Here's an illustrative anecdote. When Tower first opened in New York
in the early 1980s, a friend of mine who was a specialist in early
music took a trip from Woodstock to New York just to shop at Tower.
She came back filled with enthusiasm. She had spent over $300 (a lot
for her, especially in those days) on LPs she had never seen before.
She told me Tower had the best early music section she had ever seen
in a record store.

Six months later she went back. She was really disappointed. There
were a few new releases, some of which she bought. Otherwise, she
said, the early music section had just the things she had left behind
six months earlier, and the records she had bought had not been
restocked.

That was Tower in a nutshell. The business always seemed to have an
institutional policy: throw as much stock at the customers as
possible, and don't bother about the details. Stock control was never
a strong point at Tower. They were more interested in sheer quantity.

I used to shop the Tower Annex whenever I was in New York. It was a
large store around the corner from the main Tower Records shop (the
first one, on 8th Street) filled with remainders and used records. I
would look through a bin of remainders and often find 20 or 30 copies
of the same record. That's a hideous waste of expensive retail space,
but apparently it worked better for them than to have only one or two
copies in the bin and replace them when they were sold. That was too
much trouble. Things were sometimes better in the regular retail
sections of the store, but not always.

Tower wasn't very good with special orders, either. (Too much
detail?) The sales staff wasn't usually very well informed. The
classical section I visited was usually staffed by pierced people who
were listening to rap music on their headphones while they rang up
sales.

Here's another illustrative Tower story. More than ten years ago I
was recruited by a magazine editor I knew who had been running the
classical music section of Tower's free in-store magazine Pulse! He
had talked the management into trying a new all-classical review
magazine, Classical Pulse! The magazine was designed for quick
reading. Reviews were brief, and they were headed by a one to five
star rating.

Classical Pulse! ran for several years. It was obviously a success.
Paid advertising was abundant. Records reviewed favorably in the
magazine sold very well (but there were also plenty of unfavorable
reviews, although writers were asked to recommend alternatives when
panning a CD). Eventually, management pulled the plug on Classical
Pulse! because, they said, the advertising was not covering the
entire cost of publishing the magazine. That had never been the plan
in the first place, and the increased sales the editors had been
hoping for had materialized very impressively. But that was too much
thinking, I guess.

I'll have some fond memories of Tower. I got plenty of interesting
material for my collection there. Because Tower had a branch in
Japan, it was able to purchase many Japanese CDs and (my favorite!)
classical laserdiscs which were never issued here and bring them into
the U.S. Among many other things, I still have my original Toshiba CD
of The Beatles' "Abbey Road," the first Beatles CD ever issued. It
was meant for domestic Japanese sale only, and it was deleted when
Toshiba realized how many copies were being sold outside of Japan.
Mostly by Tower.