Montreal, CA | Montreal record shops blame ‘archaic’ rule dating back to 1970s for lost sales: Phonopolis co-owner is glad city plans to allow longer opening hours, but he’s still stuck with hefty fines. On an average Saturday in Mile End, customers start trickling into Phonopolis record stores late in the morning or in the early afternoon. Co-owner Nick Kirschner said the shop’s peak hours are usually late afternoon, and people will happily shop into the evening. That’s why he was surprised to learn about an old rule on the books that forbids him from staying open past 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. It was on record store day — of all days — in April 2019 that an inspector walked into Phonopolis and informed staff of the rules governing opening hours. Kirschner later received $2,950 worth of fines in the mail. He said running a small business in Montreal is difficult enough, especially in a neighbourhood where high rents are driving out many commercial tenants. “These fines that we received for being open too late … are just an example of an endless list of issues that we deal with every day…”
Los Angeles, CA | Amoeba Hollywood is Moving: We are excited to announce the next home of Amoeba Hollywood will be at 6200 Hollywood Blvd! We are humbled by the massive outpouring of support throughout this search from our customers and the LA community. We aim to do you proud and continue on as your supreme source for music, movies, and so much more. We will bring that familiar Amoeba energy into this new space and you can be sure it will provide the “true Amoeba experience” as we will carry the same breadth and depth of selection. We look forward to seeing you at our new home on the corner of Hollywood & Argyle this Fall, and have provided more details for you below. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. We’re moving to 6200 Hollywood Blvd! We’re going to take up a huge ground level space on the corner of Hollywood and Argyle in the new “El Centro” complex in downtown Hollywood. This is just 2 blocks east and 2 blocks north of our current location, and right next door to the Fonda Theatre so we’ll be easy to find!
Washington, DC | Grandmaster Flash poised to school fans on hip-hop history at U Street Music Hall: “…Back in the ’70s, we had no technology, no computers, no studios, no beat machines, no apps, no nothing,” Flash said. “So how would the music track be generated? We had to get duplicate copies of the record and pick the desired section where the drum solo was, which a lot of time was like 10 seconds, then cut and paste it and extend it for three or four minutes so the rapper would have a beat to speak on.” That meant voracious shopping in record stores to find the perfect drum break. “When I went shopping for records to find that drum break, we went shopping in the pop section of the record store, or the rock section, or the jazz section, or the blues section, or the funk section, or the R&B section, or the alternative section, or the Caribbean section, or the Latin section, just to find that drum break,” Flash said. …“When we go record shopping, it’s a crapshoot, but once you break the plastic, you buy it, like it or not,” Flash said. “So we would buy records on guessing. I’d bring the record home and play every cut trying to find that drum solo and it would all be crap, so that would go in the crap crate.”
Waco, TX | Vinyl records live on in Waco shop: Across the world, hipsters and collectors alike continue to support the decades-old industry of vinyl records. Despite being one of the oldest forms of recorded music, vinyls continue to make a way for themselves in the age of streaming. In recent years, vinyl sales have been on a continuous rise in the United States, according to Statista’s data recording LP album sales between 1993 and 2019 in the United States. During a time when you can stream any song imaginable within seconds, this continual growth is somewhat of a phenomenon. Vinyl album sales in the United States have shown consistent growth since 2006. By 2019, the industry was up by 14.5% from the previous year, having sold 18.84 million vinyl records, Statista reported. However, the United States isn’t the only country experiencing the resurgence of vinyl popularity. In 2017, the Japanese arm of Sony Music announced in a press release it would open its own vinyl record manufacturing factory in order to keep up with the demand of the Japanese vinyl market.
Record Executive Vicky Hamilton Talks Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Her New Label, and More: The renowned music industry figure told her story in the book Appetite for Dysfunction. Vicky Hamilton came to Los Angeles from the Midwest in 1980 and cut her teeth working at a record store on the Sunset Strip and helping to promote Mötley Crüe’s early career. She then went on to propel Poison, Stryper, Guns N’ Roses, and Faster Pussycat into the spotlight, literally shedding blood (she once stapled her thumb to a picture of Vince Neil for a display she was creating in a record store) sweat, and tears to help support emerging artists that she felt had star power. Hamilton has been hailed by Forbes magazine as “one of the most successful music executives in the business.” She has worked on gut instinct that proved to be right time and again. To give it some perspective, as a Geffen executive, two projects she took interest in that the label passed on were the Goo Goo Dolls and Toad the Wet Sprocket. They undoubtedly regretted those decisions.
