Cool! The indie store near me has a lineup of local acts to celebrate their birthday tomorrow. I was planning to drop by. I've been wanting very much to see Mom. Thanks for the info bmarkey.

(On preview, it seems they scheduled it to coincide w/ Record Store Day.)

Hey, this is quite awesome! Since we live in a town with one of the last independents (well sort of, tiny regional chain), I'm totally excited to learn about this and will make a point of going.

We had three AWESOME indie shops within city limits when I was in college.

There was Worldwide, by my school, with a larger secondhand collection than most places stock total. Half my coworkers from campus radio worked there.

Then there was Home of the Hits... old, tiny, cramped, full of bins of obscure punk and goth disks, below racks sagging with t-shirts. Everyone who worked there seemed to be in a well known local band. The first floor of a victorian house, the area that had once been some proper family's front hall was covered in fliers for shows and causes and signs looking for musicians, with rows of skateboards against the walls.

Then there was New World. They moved into a new location while I was in school, adjoining the biggest locally-owend copyshop. Huge, full of iron and glass, they had a wide selection of archie mcphee goodies between the cd and record bins, music magazines from all over, a focus on local artists with frequent instores. I lived a block from them at one point.

Worldwide closed while I was still in school, an early victim of the manager's perceived gentrification trend in the neighborhood, a trend that never materialized although rumor had it he set the rents for it. It was split into three storefronts eventually, two are empty now, one holds a jamacian take-out.

Home of the Hits closed a couple years ago. It's now a tattoo parlor, but there are plans to tear down the building it was in (and four others) for a boutique hotel). Local gossip says their rent was kept artificially low for years, in a strange unspoken agreement with the property owner to overlook a series of serious code violations and overall mismanagement of the physical structure.

New World moved from their gorgeous location in the Elmwood strip, a shop they had built, to a strip mall on the border of the city and a first ring suburb less than a year ago, hoping they could be saved by lower rent and ample parking.
They're currently having a final going out of business sale.

Here's the fallout.

For what it's worth, we saw more people in Easy Street that day than we'd ever seen before, and the line at the counter was long but quick-moving. I hope there's some carry-over.