Greed Ultimately Ended Tower Records
I've been enjoying the documentary All Things Must Pass, directed by Colin Hanks. If you haven't seen it, you can find it on YouTube for free as of this writing. I know I'm not alone in being somebody who would go there to get my music. I was fortunate to have a few options in my area before the record stores started going out of business. Tower Records was definitely one of the more expensive establishments, but you could usually find what you were looking for.
Russ Solomon seemed to be the man with the golden touch for a while. The documentary tells the story of how he had big plans for his father's Tower Record Mart business, but his father wanted no part of it. Russ took over that location and started expanding from there. It didn't happen overnight. Once it did happen, it was too tempting to continue the expansion.
I've heard people say that if you're not expanding in business, you're shrinking, or something along those lines. To me, that's the greedy way to look at it. If you're a big corporation, that's the temptation. Grow, grow, grow. Put other places that offer what you do out of business. I think we have to look at the role that this played in what happened to Tower.
The money was coming in, but Russ was borrowing to make it happen. He only saw the dollar signs, but that is a flawed way to look at it. If you're not using your own money and risking your own money, there is a danger in all of that borrowing. The bill will come due eventually, and Tower Records did not have the money to pay them back. If they had been smarter in their expansion, maybe things would have been a little bit different?
The other part of this equation is twofold. CDs had taken over, and they were becoming more expensive. The fact is, every time the record labels changed the way the music was delivered, the price went up a little bit more. From records, to 8 tracks, to cassettes and then to CDs, you were paying more to buy that album, and sometimes you were doing so for a band or artist who only had one or two songs you really wanted.
What Russ did at some point was eliminate the singles. 45s were big when I started to discover my own love for music. I couldn't afford the albums, even though they were much more reasonable in cost than than they are now. I bought a few, but oftentimes I'd get the 45. If I was lucky enough, that record had a B Side I enjoyed as much as the A Side, and I got my plays out of it. I'd pretend I was a DJ back in those days and spin records as I talked about each song in my introduction.
Without the single model, people would go into Tower and want one or two songs from the artist and couldn't get it. At that point, they weren't so willing to spend $20 for something that only had a couple of songs they wanted, and sales went down. This was a recipe for disaster. By the time we entered the 2000s, the writing was already on the wall. They might have been able to do a course correction, but they figured forcing people to buy the CDs and expanding the business was the answer.
Napster played a part in things. Sure, we don't go to Napster to get those songs or even albums any more, but we don't have to. They opened the door for platforms such as Spotify and YouTube, and we just get our music there. Bands aren't making music to make money. They are doing it for the art, because they already know they're not making much money off of their new music. They make their money by touring. Oftentimes, the older bands aren't even playing songs off of their newer albums.
CDs aren't a big deal anymore. People still collect them. The serious collectors get new albums on vinyl again. Even if that's a little bit more expensive, they do it for the collection. There is something to be said about a record album with its liner notes and the album cover. People used to enjoy the record buying experience. I liked the covers, especially when they had liner notes and even lyrics on them.
People would have pirated music, even if CDs weren't big and we were still buying cassettes. There are ways for us to transfer cassette and even record collections onto computer, and therefore onto our phones or other devices. CDs just made it easier to pirate the music. You could rip the music right off of the CDs. There probably wasn't going to be a new medium after CDs that wouldn't make it even easier to pirate the songs.
What is the answer? This is multifaceted as well. Tower would have had to have gone back to selling singles once again. There's no way around it. They would have needed to produce singles on CDs again, but listeners would have eventually had the option of buying singles on CDs phased out. There's another way they could have gone, and that's probably the only chance they would have had. They would still be competing with the idea that people could just get their music online.
In going into a Tower location, one advantage could have been to build your own album. At a listening station, the listener should have been given the option to buy a record at a set price. For 10 or 12 songs, you would have been able to pay a certain price for it. Maybe $20 still would have been the cost. Perhaps that would have been the cost to buy a band's album in that way, but to buy a compilation it would have been a little bit higher.
At the kiosk, I could picture a scenario by which people would listen to the songs and pick what they wanted. The fan of the popular songs of the time could have been able to pick out all of their favorite hits on an album. The question becomes, would you just be able to deliver this to a person's iPad or smart device directly, or would there be some sort of physical copy of your purchase?
I can see both being an option. Maybe all you care about is having the music on your chosen device, and it would be transferred directly to it. Another way would be for you to be given an SD drive, either one of the smaller ones that could go directly into your phone or the bigger one that could go onto your laptop or desktop computer. Included would also be a specially printed paper with the titles of all of your songs and writing credits for each song. There could even be a lyric sheet included. It might be that for whatever the determined fee is, you could just print the album cover if it's an official compilation album or band album.
I know somebody is going to say that you're just adding to the piracy. To that I say the genie is already out of the bottle. People are going to be pirating the music regardless. The record store might still be offering CDs. They might even see vinyl making a comeback. However, the kiosk that allows you to build your own purchase would be there as well. That might be the way in which record stores could have at least had a fighting chance to stay alive, including Tower Records.
It's really hard to say. Something like this wasn't seriously attempted from my recollection. Tower Records was already in deep financial trouble by the time this could have been attempted, and Russ didn't have any say in those decisions. In my area in California, the only establishment that survived was Rasputin Records, which also dealt in used music. Even the retailers, such as Circuit City and Best Buy aren't options anymore. We've pretty much been forced online for music purchases, and the damage done to the music industry is a huge.
I won't even get into how new bands haven't been given the opportunity to develop over the last two or three decades in the way the older bands were, and sadly there's a lot of great music we don't even hear anymore. Instead, people are paying big ticket prices to go see bands that are aging, and the newer bands that we might love are out there doing it in front of smaller crowds with music most people have never heard.
I'll say it again, it wasn't just technology that put Tower Records out of business. It was the greed of some of their decisions. Expanding too quickly, eliminating the single and therefore not even being around when another way was discovered to deliver listeners the new music they craved. Who knows what Russ or his people at Tower Records would have come up with to stay relevant. You may think it's a moot point now. You may be right.
