Last record store standing?: An ode to Amoeba Music

July 13, 2010

LOS ANGELES, USA – I spent two summers of my late adolescence working at Sam Goody, a music store in the local mall.  Despite the embarrassing corporate “Sam Goody” apron I had to wear, it was a teenager’s dream job to get paid to listen to music all day and earn discounts on music purchases (admittedly, most of my paychecks went right back into Sam Goody’s profits).  This being the early ’90s, the biggest project I worked on was to convert the store display racks for the arrival of a new technology known as…the compact disc.  As the inventory of cassettes got relegated to the back wall, none of us could have imagined that the advent of digital music would ultimately spell the demise of the record store as we knew it.

Today, there’s no more Sam Goody in my hometown mall.  The internet has all but made the brick-and-mortar record store extinct across the U.S.  Even in the music capital of the world, Los Angeles, there’s been one music store casualty after another, from mom-and-pop ventures like Aron’s Records to behemoths like Tower Records and the Virgin Megastore.  Not to sound like a crotchety old-timer, but I just can’t get used to buying all my music online.  Maybe it’s the nostalgia factor of my very first summer job, but I feel a personal tie to music stores and the people who work in them.

Rising up from the rubble of shuttered music shops in LA is wunderkind Amoeba Music.  Amoeba started in 1990 in Berkeley, California — channeling the counterculture music scene of famed Telegraph Avenue — just around the same time as digital music was planting the seeds of doom for corporate chains like Sam Goody and its ilk.  Amoeba thrived by bucking the corporate trend and staying connected to its community of listeners; it became a tastemaker pointing the way to must-have tunes.

I first discovered Amoeba when I lived in Berkeley and soon began my infamous “Amoeba runs,” in which I’d descend on the place once every few months and emerge with an armload of CDs.  When I later moved to LA, I felt Amoeba-deprived until the chainlet set up shop on Hollywood Boulevard in 2001 (there’s also a third location on Haight Street in San Francisco).  All locations are cavernous, warehouse-like spaces decked out in vintage posters of album art and bursting with music stock both digital and vinyl, studio and indie, contemporary and classical, popular and obscure, new and used, homegrown and imported (from EVERY corner of the globe!).

Aside from the exhaustive selection and über-knowledgeable staff, perks include reasonable prices (often times you can find what you want used) and nifty CD listening stations, where you can scan the barcode and preview tunes on the spot — great for discovering new bands before you decide to invest.  Check the website for a schedule of free in-store concerts by top acts swinging through town on tour.  And by all means, make a Hollywood day of it: the store’s in walking distance to the stellar ArcLight movie theater and (on Sundays) the Hollywood Farmers Market.  Yes, you could order all these commodities (music, movies, even produce) on the internet, but there’s nothing like the smell of popcorn in front of the big screen, the taste of a fresh peach from a local farmer, or the tactile pleasure of cracking open the cellophane of a spanking-new CD.

Amoeba Music
6400 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
(1) 310-245-6400
Website
Map

Learn more about Amoeba Music on The Purple Passport