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| From | "Bryan" <munki100@pacbell.net> |
| Subject | More L.A. record store news - Amoeba Bets on the Past, Future |
| Date | Thu, 17 Nov 2005 21:21:35 -0800 |
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Los Angeles Times - November 17, 2005
Michael Hiltzik:Golden State
Record Chain Bets on the Past, Future
No industry has been as thoroughly eviscerated by new technologies and
changing cultural norms as the music business.
The record companies are consolidating, laying people off, wondering whither
their audience has fled.
Record chains like Tower Records and Wherehouse Music have spent long
stretches under bankruptcy protection. Makers of portable devices and
purveyors of online music are all searching for the right formula to serve a
mass market.
Through all this upheaval, Amoeba Music survives. The independent record
chain was founded in 1990 in a Berkeley storefront and subsequently expanded
to three stores - one on San Francisco's Haight Street and another, launched
in November 2001 near Sunset and Vine, that instantly became a Hollywood
landmark.
Up to now Amoeba's success has been based on looking backward. It relies for
as much as half its unit volume on used, vintage, and collectible LPs
("vinyl" in used-record parlance), CDs, and DVDs on which high profit
margins make up for the razor-thin margins on new CDs. Amoeba's used-record
buyers are masters at assessing with a glance material that comes across its
trade-in counters by the thousands per day - more than 200,000 items a month
at the Hollywood location alone, not including items acquired from
established collections or at estate sales.
But Amoeba is about to take a couple of big leaps into the future, with
plans to start its own record label and to create an online site for
downloadable music.
"We're starting the 21st century now," Dave Prinz, 52, one of the company's
co-founders, told me last week in Berkeley. "The Internet is changing
everything. We were ignoring it."
As a chain that has stayed in private hands, remained manageably compact,
and built a devoted (not to say fanatical) clientele, Amoeba has long seemed
immune from the changes roiling the rest of the industry. Only this year has
it detected any flattening of sales that might arguably be traced to free
peer-to-peer music trading and commercial downloading sites.
Part of its appeal to customers is the stores' unique atmosphere. Amoeba
shuns industry promotions that make customers at Tower Records or Best Buy
feel as if they're trapped in a "living commercial," in the words of Marc
Weinstein, 48, who was working in a Bay Area record store when he co-founded
Amoeba with Prinz and two other friends. (One, Karen Pearson, now oversees
the L.A. store; the other is retired.)
Amoeba takes great pride in the uncanny erudition of its staff - its test
for applicants for a buyer's position is so tough that, according to company
legend, only one person, a buyer at the Haight store, has ever notched a
perfect grade.
Indeed, armed with a list of hard-to-find CDs from several genres, I was
able to stump the Berkeley floor staff on only one, an obscure Hungarian
recording of the ensemble piece "Coming Together/Attica" by composer
Frederic Rzewski that I've been trying to replace for years.
Amoeba is the rare chain where the inventory encompasses items including the
Guarneri Quartet's 30-year-old recording of Mozart's Six Quartets Dedicated
to Haydn, Ellington's "Great Paris Concert" and a huge selection of the
avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn - not to mention black metal, electronica,
world music and much more. The very breadth of the inventory creates its own
sense of community among the customers - especially within the diversity of
L.A.
"Amoeba is this little distillation machine," Weinstein says. "I can't tell
you how many people thank me just for creating a place you can go and be
proud of the L.A. scene."
Weinstein and his partners have consistently resisted pressure to expand the
chain beyond what they could embrace with their own arms, turning down
feelers from New York and Chicago. Los Angeles was harder to rebuff, in part
because customers visiting the Bay Area from Southern California kept
pleading for a local outlet.
"L.A. was the biggest chance we took," Weinstein says. "It was the chance of
losing control."
The owners focused their energies by making the L.A. store big enough to
serve as a destination for the entire region. They spent roughly $2.5
million to acquire used vinyl and CDs over a period of months before the
grand opening of their 30,000-square-foot store, seeding it with an
inventory that exceeded that of the two Bay Area stores combined.
The new store soon exceeded the owners' projections, and not merely in sales
volume.
"The sheer number of hard-core music lovers and collectors in L.A. was far
beyond what we expected," Weinstein says. "Then there's the ethnic and
economic diversity. It's a deep and rich tapestry, and after 25 years up
here in the Bay Area, it's refreshing to have that alternative reality in my
life."
Still, opening a major bricks-and-mortar location doesn't sound like an
experience the partners are eager to repeat. Instead, they're contemplating
alternative ways of distributing music.
That has led to plans, still in development, for an Internet download site,
perhaps to absorb the technological challenges they know are coming. "The
next store we build will be virtual," Prinz says.
More advanced are plans for an Amoeba record label. Prinz, an enthusiast who
wears his passions on his sleeve, says the first CD, scheduled for January,
will be a previously unreleased 1969 concert recording by one of his
artistic heroes, the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Prinz hopes to
follow the CD with other archival material from Parsons, only a fraction of
which appeared before the musician's death in 1973 at the age of 26.
Amoeba will also release an album featuring the Robin Nolan Trio, a Gypsy
jazz group inspired by Django Reinhardt, and Brandi Shearer, a local singer
who happened to join the Nolan group for a promotional appearance at the
Haight Street store and knocked Prinz over with her smoky voice.
The label's business model will thus reflect that of the stores - a little
looking back, and a little looking forward. Says Weinstein, "this business
has always been about the cool stuff we could bring to people."
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