RIP Tower Records
After a 29-hour auction that ended Friday, longtime music retailer Tower Records was sold to […]
After a 29-hour auction that ended Friday, longtime music retailer Tower Records was sold to Great American Group for a whopping $134.3 million. The company has expressed plans to liquidate Tower, and have already begun the process with going out of business sales that began this past weekend.
Tower has 89 stores in 20 states, and has been in operation since the opening of the Hollywood store in 1969. It filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in August, citing a decline in CD sales as part of the reason for doing so. Friday’s sale and the liquidation to follow will result in more than 3,000 employees losing their jobs, not to mention the end to one of America’s largest record store chains.
Tower’s founder, Russ Solomon, began the chain in 1960 by selling records out of his father’s drugstore. An auction stuffed with corporate jargon and money isn’t the most ideal good-bye for an almost iconic record store chain, but perhaps all we can do is accept it and utter a phrase that’s all too frequent anymore: it is what it is.
The original Tower Records store on Sunset Blvd in West Hollywood.