1. Tower's only excuse has to be stupidity... one needn't look far to see buzzing brick and mortar music scenes here in San Francisco -- which is as internet enabled as a city can get. Ameoba is busier than City Hall, Rasputin is almost as good, and to a lesser degree Borders Books and Virgin all seem to have figured out how to get people to walk through their doors. Then there's the promise of starbucks "hearmusic" stores.

Here's the key... they're all fun places to shop for sounds -- hell -- I often go with my friends... that seems to be the key.

Posted at 6:20PM on Aug 23rd 2006 by Peter

2. Tower's days are numbered. I am a heavy music buyer in fortyish age. I buy a couple hundered CDs a year. I used to go to Tower regularly now I go maybe every couple of months. I do go to Barnes and Nobles every week. I have a frequent buyer card which costs me $25 a year but I break even if I spend $250 (%10 discount on everything I buy) a year and I spend more like $2500 a year. I get coupons all the time from B&N. B&N keeps in touch with their best customers and offers compelling values. Tower could care less about me. Their employees are diffident and uninterested in the product they sell. The only common requirement for Tower employees is how much body piercing they have.

Tower and the Record Industry should be beating a path to the door of a customer like me. Instead they litigate against their customers and act like charging list price in a store like Tower in the age of Internet Froogle searches is perfectly normal. There is no reason why a CD should cost $19.00 but Tower regualarly charges that for new releases that I am interested in. I can find the same CD online for $12 to $14. That is is a ridiculous cost difference.

The Record Industry is F#$ked. The sooner they can recognize this and get on with the replacement will be none to soon for me.

Posted at 7:31PM on Aug 23rd 2006 by Chris Barker

3. you buy hundreds of cds a year? that equates to about one cd every three days IF you buy 100 cds a year. but you said hundreds which implies multiple hundreds which would equate to about a cd almost every day. thats literally, even at a low cost of 15$ a cd, about 4,000$ in cds. STOP DUDE YOU ARE lining these business mans pockets with friggin gold here. Of that 4,000$, literally about 40$ has been handed out to artists. way to go. i fully support artists, though im not hugely into music i believe everyone should get paid for their works. but these artists are just begging to get ripped off by the riaa in the first place.

they aren't "F#$ked" as long as you keep filling their pockets with solid freaking gold.

Posted at 10:26PM on Aug 23rd 2006 by nonameguy

4. Haha have to laugh at the comment above that seems to indicate a 1% royalty rate for artists on CD sales. Hey Einstein, how much do you suppose an artist gets from digital downloads? I'll give you a clue - it's a fraction of even THAT unless you are Springsteen or Madonna with the pull to get your contract rewritten every year...usually the artist receives close to nothing.

The only company making money off "digital music" is Apple as they continue to watch the growth of the stock price - which also seems to indicate that they are as high as they can get (remember AOL's marketshare five years ago?).

Posted at 1:36PM on Aug 31st 2006 by Karl

5. All I hear is people banging Tower. Go to WalMart, or other mass sell stores, and what do you find. The top 20 or top 25. Tower has library. Yes, you can get old tunes from online distributors, but they have only a limited selection. I can guarantee that if one of you is looking for an older album, Tower will be one of the first places you go to. Digital music hasn't killed Tower, a lack of forward thinking just might.

Posted at 7:37PM on Sep 5th 2006 by Mike

6. I worked for Tower (manger) for almost 11 years and Tower doomed itself when it started to be run by banks instead of the cool hippies that started it. When Tower raised it's prices in the mid-90's it slowly lost people to the Best Buy's and Wal-Marts of the world. Then came Napster, and Itunes etc. that put the death nail in. If Tower had been able to stay competively priced they could have kept a lot of customers that prefer music stores to Wal-Marts and such. They could have at least kept some higher volume stores open. The banks need the unprcedented 32% margin in music retail and that made Tower raise the prices which in turn drove away customers and hence we have the end of an era.
Trust me, you'll miss places like Tower when the only place you can get hard copy music is Big Box stores and Best Buy type birck and mortar.
Also look for the online music retail to get more abusive with their power as we start to see them rape the artists and consumers even more. Things seem to falling right into the hands of these online behemoths and they are loving it. care about the artists, bullshit!
Artists need to start DIY-ing and start realizing that the biz has changed and that they can create their own power and not have to do the same S&%T. Who needs a label if you can reach the world? Labels are great for marketing, but who pays for that marketing? The Artists. It's a fucked up system and as much as ITUNES and APPLE like to think they are cool and for the people and artists, they are full of shit.

Posted at 1:43PM on Sep 27th 2006 by Ryanchitwn

7. As a current Tower employee I would chime in and say this company is in trouble, and needs help and a revamping, but it might shock you to know that I have no tatoos or body piercings, and exceptional with customers, and know not only my department-world music inside and out, but also rock, country, blues, and movies-so stuff it if you have had one bad experience with an employee that you condemn the entire chain. You will be very sad when you cant find anything other than what the corporate shills cram down your throats on tv and radio. Tower could be, should be so much better. We have people who come in looking at CD's to get ideas for downloading. Well guess what, you want to download, great, do it, but stop using us as a freakin' library. If we close, you will never find things that are outside the norm. If all you want is the latest thing that Entertainment Weekly or some similar outlet tells you to buy, then to be honest you should just shop at FYE or similar, 'cos you obviously have no desire to expand your horizons

Posted at 9:05PM on Oct 5th 2006 by Patrick Gildea

8. I spoke to an old friend who worked some years at the Tower Records in Mesa, Arizona. He told me a number of tales of mind-boggling stupidity which rivalled that of the Bush Administration:

1) The Mesa store was 1/2 mile from Mesa Community College, which had an enrollment larger than a lot of universities (~20,000 students). They did not run ads in the student newspaper. They did not do student discounts. There was an independent record store - a rather large one - that I worked at around the same time, we were slightly closer to the college and boy were we grateful that Tower was so stupid.

2) Best Buy moved in across the street and suddenly Tower couldn't sell the top 10 CDs for $18 when BB was selling them for $10 or $11. So Tower would drop the price for a month then they'd raise it the next month and sales would crater. Go figure.

3) Nobody with actual retail marketing experience in the marketing position in the regional office.

4) Tower had a very big, very popular store right next to the Arizona State campus in Tempe. I shopped at this store since I was old enough to ride a bike down to Mill Avenue. Around the early 1990s ASU purchased the shopping center for future expansion and all the leases went month-to-month. At any time Tower could have been given 30 days' notice to vacate. Did they look for a new location? That would be a big fat NO. Hell that month-to-month lasted for 3 or 4 years I think. 3 or 4 years to find a new store location and they just did nothing.

5) Tower was given first dibs on a new space in the basement of the Memorial Union (aka Student Union on other campuses) and they REJECTED it because it was too small. Some other indy record store came in and I assure you they are cleaning up. It's an unbeatable location on a campus with 50,000 students.

6) Shitty employees. Sorry, Tower employees who posted here but at least at the Mesa location, it was known as 'last chance retail', as in, if you couldn't hold down a retail job elsewhere you might be qualified to work at Tower.

7) Shitty pay.

The tales of mind-boggling stupidity went on and on and on. Again I'm just passing on first-hand accounts. Maybe the big city Tower stores were run differently but at least out here they were almost deliberately run into the ground.

It's hard enough to stay in business as a bricks-and-mortar CD/DVD store even when you're trying to keep up with changes in the market. When you're not doing ANYTHING and you just expect people to keep coming in because you're Tower dammit... well, buh bye.

Posted at 1:29AM on Oct 15th 2006 by r?nato

9. I spoke to an old friend who worked some years at the Tower Records in Mesa, Arizona. He told me a number of tales of mind-boggling stupidity which rivalled that of the Bush Administration:

1) The Mesa store was 1/2 mile from Mesa Community College, which had an enrollment larger than a lot of universities (~20,000 students). They did not run ads in the student newspaper. They did not do student discounts. There was an independent record store - a rather large one - that I worked at around the same time, we were slightly closer to the college and boy were we grateful that Tower was so stupid.

2) Best Buy moved in across the street and suddenly Tower couldn't sell the top 10 CDs for $18 when BB was selling them for $10 or $11. So Tower would drop the price for a month then they'd raise it the next month and sales would crater. Go figure.

3) Nobody with actual retail marketing experience in the marketing position in the regional office.

4) Tower had a very big, very popular store right next to the Arizona State campus in Tempe. I shopped at this store since I was old enough to ride a bike down to Mill Avenue. Around the early 1990s ASU purchased the shopping center for future expansion and all the leases went month-to-month. At any time Tower could have been given 30 days' notice to vacate. Did they look for a new location? That would be a big fat NO. Hell that month-to-month lasted for 3 or 4 years I think. 3 or 4 years to find a new store location and they just did nothing.

5) Tower was given first dibs on a new space in the basement of the Memorial Union (aka Student Union on other campuses) and they REJECTED it because it was too small. Some other indy record store came in and I assure you they are cleaning up. It's an unbeatable location on a campus with 50,000 students.

6) Shitty employees. Sorry, Tower employees who posted here but at least at the Mesa location, it was known as 'last chance retail', as in, if you couldn't hold down a retail job elsewhere you might be qualified to work at Tower.

7) Shitty pay.

The tales of mind-boggling stupidity went on and on and on. Again I'm just passing on first-hand accounts. Maybe the big city Tower stores were run differently but at least out here they were almost deliberately run into the ground.

It's hard enough to stay in business as a bricks-and-mortar CD/DVD store even when you're trying to keep up with changes in the market. When you're not doing ANYTHING and you just expect people to keep coming in because you're Tower dammit... well, buh bye.

Posted at 1:30AM on Oct 15th 2006 by r?nato

10. I used work for Tower as the rock/indie/classical buyer in one of the profitable stores in the Los Angeles region (10 Years).

Over four years ago Tower began to phase-in centralized purchasing. This is a model that has been a proven failure for the music retail industry (Wherehouse, Sam Goody's/Musicland, Music+), yet the Tower execs believed that they would be the exception. Little by little I began to loose control over the inventory; It started with reorders (FYI, I've never purchased singles). They would rely on a computer model to find patters in a dynamic environment. Just because band J sold thousands in one store does not guarantee a repeat performance for their next release. Whatever sold in this store may not sell just 12 miles away! The opposite is also true. My former GM would ask me what drove me to make my buying decisions, but I would say "I just know", and would not elaborate. I knew that I would be replaced, yet it seemed as if their program couldn't find a buying pattern (at least, not mine). About a year after my departure (and about a year into full implementation of their new business model), Tower filed their first of two Bankruptcies.

Last weekend I paid a visit to my old store only to see its inventory look more like Best Buy, except for the price point. The deep catalogue was less than ideal, and the key box sets were nowhere to be found. Sure, they expanded their DVD selection, but it seemed as if they shrunk their CD inventory by 15,000 units.

Now that they're one nail short of sealing in their coffin, I will disclose my secret on being a buyer: Listen to your customers by SPEAKING to them in person. Tower used to have employees that lived and breathed music and movies, who would in turn relate their observations to someone who could shape the buying decisions. I would talk to my customers and ask them what they liked and disliked, and I tailored my buying decisions on that. If I liked band X, but my customers prefer band Y, it is obvious that I had to set my tastes aside and get band Y, feature it in a discretionary listening station, and put it on sale. If I discover that a customer listens to a specific artist, I would turn around and take them to a listening station featuring another artist with a similar style. In fact, anything that I would recommend was fully backed by our return policy. If I was wrong (rare, but it happens) I would allow them to exchange it for anything else without question. Guess what? They would return and ask me for MORE recommendations! Of course I was not the only one, because we had the experienced people who did NOT read music reviews. Yes, this buyer before you did not care for the opinions of music reviewers, only the opinions of his customers...and I was successful. You would think that this is common sense, but how can anybody know what the public wants if the current buyers get their info from Reps who work on commission, or reviewers who write favorable reviews only to snag a one-on-one interview? Once they removed their local buyers, Tower lost their ear, pulse, and soul.

To put it all together: Independence and impartiality was the key to success, but Russ Solomon and Michael Thomas Solomon forgot, thereby losing their company and soul.

Posted at 10:18PM on Oct 15th 2006 by Eddie