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More than a year after the pandemic forced it to shut down, and just ahead of its 20th anniversary as a Hollywood luminary, music retailer Amoeba Music reopened on Thursday morning.
The moment, marked by the required giant scissor tape cut, occurred just before 11 a.m. on Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle Avenue. A line of stunned, young, mostly masked buyers, many of whom had been waiting since early in the morning to enter Valhalla music, stretched south downstream from Argyle and around the block. The queue sat there for hours.
“The pandemic has been difficult for everyone, so I feel like it’s going to boost morale, bring joy,” said Alonzo Vasquez, who had come from the Central Valley with friends for shopping. . His mission: to hunt down anything on LP by Los Angeles-based psych-punk band Osees.
“I have a feeling that will make times normal. We’re recovering spots, ”he said, the lower half of his face obscured by his face mask.
“We’ve been waiting for a year,” said Kerri Barta, a resident of Silver Lake, who was near the entrance to the access point. Until COVID-19, a visit to Amoeba was part of the weekly ritual for her and her companion Jason Yates. “It has been a big hole in our life.”
As the line attests, so are many Angelenos, especially the store staff. In mid-March, management recalled many of the 200 Amoeba employees made jobless by the shutdown, and on Thursday dozens helped customers eager to explore the 23,000 square feet of retail space at the shop.
If, from an outsider’s perspective, Amoeba’s reopening seems to have garnered inordinate attention given that the California-based retailer only has two other stores – and you can buy anything you want online – its reopening of LA marks a moment for some of the most important music in the world. centers.
Dense from artists, music producers, music supervisors (Netflix headquarters is a block away), studio engineers and, most importantly, millions of taste budding fans with social media accounts including the movements will help define the sound of the music of tomorrow, Hollywood has had sort of a mega-retailer in the area since Wallich’s Music City opened in Sunset and Vine in the early 1940s. Amoeba took on that role after the Tower Records Sunset store closed in the mid-2000s, and the new location confirms its status.
On Thursday, shoppers entered the store greeted by dozens of aisles filled with merchandise: T-shirts, turntables, collectibles, books, posters, stickers, pins – and, of course, hundreds of thousands of albums. , compact discs, cassettes, 7 inch single discs and 78 rpm. Rows of new and used vinyl racks and displays showcase new versions. Halfway through the store, a lower level of about five steps consumes the back half. It mainly contains compact discs.
A reflection of the music retail market in 2021 is the amount of space devoted to vinyl and merch at the expense of CDs. The long dominant physical format was designed to replace the less profitable and finicky vinyl from the early 1980s and remained the best-selling physical format until last year, when vinyl sales topped it. CD sales for the first time in decades.
“Admittedly, DVDs and CDs don’t get as high-end positioning as the other store, and vinyl is definitely in the spotlight,” co-owner Marc Weinstein told Variety last week, and the purchasing experience confirms this.
The store’s live scene is located in the southwest corner of the room and is centered around the same Shepard Fairey-designed background used on Sunset. Co-owner Jim Henderson, who helped cut the red ribbon on Thursday, said the in-store set schedule will be dictated by safety standards. He didn’t want to speculate on the return of live sets.
The legendary store departure line, which on busy days in the old location could extend right into the store, runs down the middle of the room with social distancing markers every six feet. The store was ready for the rush.
These should be prime times for music retailing, especially those that deal with both new and used products. Not only is there an active market for used records, but the volume of new vinyl that has entered the ecosystem over the past decade guarantees a fresh stock for years to come. Add to this that cassettes and CDs continue to have lean followers and it is possible to argue that stores that have resisted closure will come back with a vengeance.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, sales of new vinyl in 2020 increased 29.2% to $ 619.6 million, according to the Recording Industry Association of America; in 2019, that figure was $ 479.5 million. It’s still a fraction of the global billions earned in the biggest music business. In 2020, streaming grew 13.4% from the previous year and generated $ 10.1 billion, which the RIAA said accounted for 83% of total music industry revenue. .
This streaming news fell on deaf ears among those in line, who gathered in scrums two and three and tried to master the art of being both excitable and socially distanced. Another line extended the other direction towards Hollywood; there were customers carrying cases of records, bags of CDs, and stacks of books they hoped to trade in for new records – or sell to earn April rent.
The move had been planned for a long time. In 2020, the pandemic prompted the store to skip any festivities that might have happened when it left its old home on Sunset Boulevard and sprint to the new address to be ready when the pandemic allows. The target was to open in November, but the fall surge of COVID-19 pushed the schedule back to Thursday.
Amoeba opened its first two locations in the San Francisco Bay Area before unveiling its 42,000 square foot Hollywood megastore in 2001. Housed in a building purchased by Amoeba at Sunset Boulevard and Cahuenga Avenue, Amoeba-Hollywood was a destination from day one – despite the drop in retail music sales at the time due to Napster. After Amoeba sold the building to developers in 2015, a move was inevitable.
The old spot was a magnet for celebrities and record-loving musicians, and the new spot is sure to be similar.
Located in the new El Centro shopping and residential complex across from Hollywood Boulevard from the Pantages Theater and the Frolic Room, the new Amoeba has a footprint smaller than the Sunset boutique by about a quarter. Still, it’s a vast space with high ceilings and exposed ductwork and already has the feel of an inhabited store. Tape and label stickers are stuck to the doors, shelves are stocked, and Plexiglas screens protect help desk and checkout counter employees. The store’s walls are swarmed with huge posters of David Bowie, Prince, Beyonce, Patti Smith, The Beatles and dozens of others.
To absorb lost footage, vinyl and record shelving utilizes ground-level secondary racks, which once held overstock. Stools dot the aisles to facilitate access to the lower bins; the diggers crouched down and flipped through jazz records in a corner and hip-hop vinyl a few rows away.
Elsewhere, bargain hunters have scoured the bins for used CDs that sold for the same ridiculously low prices vinyl collectors admired in the mid-90s.
Vasquez wasn’t necessarily looking for bargains, he said as the line approached the door, but something more fleeting and lasting. “The first time I was here it blew me away. I still have flashbacks from that day. “
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