Five years ago, Other Music co-founder Josh Madell sat across from me at a Fort Greene café and enthused about his venerated East Village record shop going digital. It was 2007, and a brave new world seemed to be on the horizon: Its neighbor and rival, Tower Records, was shutting its doors, as were countless other music stores on the island of Manhattan. And as Other Music watched that space across East Fourth Street morph into a Halloween-costume store and a Christmas-decorations outlet (it now houses the MLB Fan Cave and Blink Fitness), it turned into the last man standing. Not that such status brings stability in the world of retail and Manhattan real estate. "Obviously, running a record shop these days is not getting any easier," Madell told me recently. "It is our passion, and there is still a lot of life left in this store, but record retailing is a tough business and getting... More >>>