Music & Record Stores

Camelot Music grew from an Ohio record shop into one of the largest mall music chains in the country, its castle-themed logo familiar in shopping centers across the Midwest and South. Camelot sold records, tapes, CDs, and accessories and rode the album boom of the 1980s and '90s. After a bankruptcy and consolidation in the shrinking music-retail business, it was absorbed by Trans World Entertainment around 2001 and rebranded as FYE.

Sam Goody built a New York record empire that became one of the country's best-known music chains, a mall staple selling LPs, then cassettes, CDs, and eventually DVDs and games. Run for years by the Musicland Group, Sam Goody was the place a generation bought its first albums. As music sales moved to discounters, downloads, and the iTunes era, the chain faltered, was rebranded toward the FYE concept, and the Sam Goody name faded out by the early 2010s.

Russ Solomon grew Tower Records from a corner of his father's Sacramento drugstore into a cultural institution, with vast, stay-open-late stores — the Sunset Strip and Greenwich Village locations chief among them — that treated records as a way of life. Famous for its yellow-and-red logo, knowledgeable clerks, and the magazine Pulse!, Tower was a hangout as much as a store. Crushed by CD downloading, big-box discounting, and heavy debt, Tower liquidated its U.S. stores in 2006.