Tower Records Inc.

Could Independent Music Giant Amoeba Be Facing a Copyright Lawsuit Nightmare?

While the corpses of corporate music retail chains litter strip malls where outlets like Tower Records and Blockbuster Music once stood, Amoeba Music is an independent juggernaut with three California-based stores the size of supermarkets. They've been a celebrated shopping destination for music afi ... More >>

Closing The Colony: A Visit To Times Square's Shuttering Sheet Music Outpost

In some ways, the Friday before last looked like business as usual at Colony Records, the venerable Theater District music-and-sheet-music retailer that recently announced its impending closing after 64 years of operation. At the counter, Warren Tesoro, an employee for 25 years, asked a middle-aged ... More >>

Q&A: VP Records' Patricia Chin, Olivier Chastan, And Neil "Diamond" Edwards On Running Their Queens Reggae Powerhouse

VP Records is the Jamaica, Queens-based powerhouse of the international reggae scene. It owns and distributes a score of other labels including its longtime rival, Greensleeves. Founded by Vincent "Randy" Chin (who died in 2003) and his wife, Patricia—children of Chinese immigrants to Jamaica ... More >>

Breakfast Bills, Weight Contests, And Good Morning America: Fact-Checking The Myths About The Fat Boys

The early rise of the Fat Boys is an unfairly overlooked rap story. Having broken through as mainstream figures in the mid-'80s, an ascent helped by collaborations with Chubby Checker, William "The Refrigerator" Perry and Robert Englund's Freddy Krueger character, the oversized hip-hop trio have bee ... More >>

Q&A: Adam Lambert On Trespassing, Stankface, Tracking Nile Rodgers On Twitter, And Being An Out Pop Star In 2012

When Adam Lambert was on American Idol in 2009, he grabbed viewers' attention with his octave-leaping voice and startling reworkings of talent-show standbys—while he came in second that season, he was certainly that year's most rock-star-like contestant, and he made even more headlines when he ... More >>

Daniel Martin-McCormick's Spin Control

The Mi Ami rocker hits the decks as Ital

Live: Van Halen Attracts The Naked, Sweaty Eyeballs To Cafe Wha?

Van Halen Cafe Wha? Thursday, January 5 Better than: Listening to David Lee Roth's Spanish-language version of "That's Life" at home alone. The crowd drawn to Macdougal Street in advance of last night's Cafe Wha? show by the reunited-once-again Van Halen—David Lee Roth on vocals, and the Va ... More >>

New Music Resolutions for 2012

Time to change up this rut we're in, music lovers

R.E.M.'s Reckoning

The band closes the book on their legacy

A Staten Island Mansion Where You Half-Expect to Find Boo Radley's Italian Cousin

And a housewarming party of 700 oysters, 100 guests, and one limo ride

Q&A: Liz Phair on Funstyle, Letting Go of Guyville, and Her Experience on Capitol

Darren AnkenmannWe were sent this. Over July 4th weekend, Liz Phair released Funstyle, her first full length in five years. For just five dollars for a full album download, the 11 tracks came with a message: the music within cost her relationships with her management company and ATO Records, who'd ... More >>

Williamsburg Record Store Sound Fix For Sale on Craigslist

​Sound Fix's James Bradley is no stranger to the vagaries of record selling business. "I used to tell people to go to the Virgin Megastore," Bradley told us last year, when we asked him what happened when people came by the defiantly indie store inquiring about the Beatles, or Katy Perry. "But ... More >>

New York Rappers Talk Their Worst Summer Jobs

Image via Darrell Bell​Hip-hop is the world's most brazenly capitalist genre of music. If Jay-Z's not talking about playing Monopoly with real cash, then Kanye West's tweeting about the cherub-motifed Persian rugs and golden goblets he's just scored at Fishs Eddy. But while certain rotund rap ... More >>

Old Tower Records Space on East 4th Finally Has A New Tenant: Equinox Gym

​And thus, the pasty record clerks and furtive customers of the old Tower Records space on East 4th give way inevitably to the musclebound men and women who beat them up in high school. That vacated storefront on the corner of Lafayette--home, variously, to Halloween costume pop-up shops and h ... More >>

On Treme's (Possibly Redeemable) Annoying Characters And Fraught Quest For "Musical Authenticity"

Don't write Steve Zahn off yet, folks​David Simon's Treme is, as has been mentioned far and wide, clearly not going to be The Wire. Sure, it's dealing with rampant corruption in a major American city and the frustration of human beings forced to deal with that corruption, doing so with an unca ... More >>

Week in Review: An Extra Side of Arrogance

R.I.P. Jay Reatard. Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.​In the week our American Idol recapper made it all the way to the BBC for calling Victoria Beckham's face "too crazy", we also tossed epithets in the direction of the Times, in solidarity with M.I.A., and toward Esquire, who this week were forced to ... More >>

Next Up For the Vacated Tower Records Store on East 4th Street? A Tower Records-Themed Art Show!

​The vacated Tower Records store on East 4th Street has been a symbol of the decline and fall of music retailing in NYC since the day it closed, back in 2006. Since then the space has hosted flea markets, Halloween stores, and any number of other temporary enterprises. The store's newest tenan ... More >>

CHAIN GANG

Tower Records lives again, sort of

A Eulogy For Tower Records

Tower, no more. Photo via yanec's photostream.​Courtesy of F2K mastermind and SOTC affiliate Maura K. Johnston: Chains of Fools, an aughts-spanning retrospective ode to those sad big box retailers that "shuffled off the turnpikes during this decade." Circuit City, Bennigan's (ha!), and Steve & ... More >>

It's Black Thursday -- Get Shopping! The Brooklyn Flea's Gifted and the Bowery Bazaar

​If you're wondering about the reindeer and snowmen that went into the window this week at the old Tower Records (on the corner of East 4th and Lafayette), it's the Brooklyn Flea's pop-up holiday market, Gifted, or -- as we fondly call it -- "the place where we're totally doing all of our holi ... More >>

Subway Restaurant Will Happily Vend Sandwiches Out of Your Defunct Record Shop

This work permit would fit nicely next to the FBI logo on future CDs​What happens to record stores in the great hereafter? They become Subway Restaurants, of course. (Unless they become discount Nordstroms, or whatever the former 4th Street Tower Records is when it's not a Halloween costume sh ... More >>

Brooklyn Flea to Take Manhattan

kthread/flickr​The Brooklyn Flea will be journeying over the East River on November 27 to hold its second-annual holiday market in the old Tower Records space through December 24. Which means that for almost a month, office workers in Soho and its environs will have greatly expanded snacking o ... More >>

Farewell, Virgin Megastore

photo via Jeff Baum Yesterday was the final day of business for Union Square's Virgin Megastore, where random in-stores and greatest hits albums you didn't even know existed provided a convenient meeting place for friends on the way to the movies, or Irving Plaza. The Times quotes a former employee ... More >>

The Top 10 Records That Sold Last Week at Other Music in the East Village

In 2009, the traditional practice of exchanging physical copies of records for money is a trade that might best be called quixotic. But New Yorkers are stubborn people, and the record store is not dead. Below, the top ten records that actually sold in the last week at a store near you. Photo of Tak ... More >>

How the Music Industry Died: Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction

A Rolling Stone reporter charts the doomed path from Thriller to Internet-based horror

Phil Kline's "Unsilent Night"

New Guns N Roses Song: Pretty Good!

God Grew Tired of Us

Record-store eulogies, blogger angst, and other symptoms of a dying industry

In the Shadow of No Tower

Insound, Other Music, and Anthology explore the brave new world of digital music

Jay-Z: Rap's Joe Lieberman

Good Riddance, Tower Records

Stuff You Need to Know This Week in Order to Avoid Ostracism

Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore Club Music

Standing in the Shadow of iTunes

Three upstart local online music stores aim for their own niche markets

Letters

Morning Report 6/23/05
Invasion U.S.A.: The Pentagon Scouts for Cannon Fodder

One More Cup of CD for the Road

Starbucks boldly markets its mild music blend

A Touch of Grey

Unlimited supply, EMI, there is no reason why, if the label sues there's sure to be a fight

Mix This

Young South Asians' Love-Hate Relationship with Hip-Hop's New Indian Beats

God Only Knows My Butt

Fourth Annual Real-Life Consumer Guide

Music

NY Mirror

Out of the ‘BLU’

Commune’s Indie Zine Goes Global

Reverse Crossover

Roots in Outer Space

The Poison Ivy League

Market Driven

Finding fashion at the fleas

Seduction Theory

Erogenous Zoning South of Times Square

Framing Diana