Tower’s competitors weren’t just other record stores. Big-box outlets like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy wanted music fans’ dollars, too. But they discounted CD prices drastically to get customers through their doors, in hopes that they’d also pile things like clothes, pet food, batteries and TVs into their shopping baskets.
“What they did was they looked at the basket — was the basket profitable?” Christman says. “So if there was a lot of other items in there, they didn’t care if it was music or not. Whereas at the record store, Tower Records, they needed everything in the basket to be profitable.”
Tower couldn’t afford to discount CDs much. And Tower couldn’t persuade consumers to spend somewhere between $12 and $19 for an album. Solomon couldn’t persuade the labels to lower their prices or start selling CD singles.
By then, music fans had already started turning to other options, from file-sharing sites like Napster to download stores like iTunes.
Hanks contends that Tower started acting as if it was just too big to fail.
“Tower, in almost 40 years, had always grown,” Hanks says. “It had always made money. It had never lost money. … Well, I think there was a lot of stuff that Tower did not see coming.”
You can hear that in a 1994 promotional video from Russ Solomon, in which Solomon says: “As for the whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday, that’s for sure. But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection — and our CD inventory, for that matter — it’s going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.”
Solomon and Tower had their critics, none of whom are in Hanks’ documentary. In the 1990s, for example, Tower — along with other megachains like HMV and Virgin — was often accused of putting independent mom and pop music retailers out of business. But for Hanks, making this film was a chance to revisit a time and experience that molded him.
“Tower was one of those places. It was special, it was unique,” he says. “You forged a connection with it, whether you knew it or not. I didn’t know it when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I started making this project that I realized just how informative it was for me when I was growing up. And it’s like that for a lot of people.”
Even though it’s been nearly a decade since Tower closed its doors, its memory still burns bright for fans whose musical tastes were shaped below those yellow-and-red signs.
Article Appeared @http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/20/450038047/the-life-and-death-of-tower-records-revisited