Tower Records will soon be no more.
The entire chain has been sold to a liquidation company. Remaining stock will be burned off cheap, then all the stores will be nothing but a memory.
There were no Tower Records stores in most of the places I've lived. Then in 2002 I began my brief period living in suburban D.C. Tower had several outlets in the metro area, but the only store I consistently visited was located in a nondescript strip mall in Rockville. On my first visit, I immediately fell in love with the place. Yeah, it was a chain store, but amazingly well-stocked: Every kind of magazine, incredibly obscure books, and the main reason I was there, the awesome music and video selection.
You could spend hours browsing through this place, finding treasures you didn't even know existed: It was the only place I ever found that carried copies of the oddball documentary Hands On A Hardbody or had an extensive collection of non-Japanese animation. And the staff was amazingly laid-back for a chain store; there was no "May I help you?", it was perfectly okay if you wanted to hang out for an hour or two and not buy anything.
Tower is disappearing for the same reason Peeple's Records here in Des Moines recently closed, the reason all the music stores in which I spent some of the happiest times of my life are no longer here: People don't buy music in stores anymore. If they do actually buy albums, they're doing it online, at Amazon. Or they're just downloading albums, or more likely just the individual tracks they want.
There are advantages to that, I guess, although none are leaping to my mind at the moment. True, everything I used to do at Tower, the browsing as well as the purchasing, I can do online. But it's not the same. One is a social experience, the other is...well, sitting in front of a screen. It's like watching large groups of people gathered together in bars and restaurants. Yeah, they're all together, but at least half of them will be on cellphones, unable to appreciate the moment, tied forever to their technology, unaware that they are allowing microchips to replace the very things that once made them human.
