Tower Records
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| Music retailer | |
| Industry | Retail |
| Founded | 1960 (as a retail music chain, defunct 2006) 1995 (as online retailer) |
| Headquarters | Sacramento, California, USA |
| Products | DVDs, CDs, videos, video games, posters, books, collectibles, and accessories. |
| Website | tower |
Tower Records was a retail music chain based in Sacramento, California. It currently exists as an international franchise and an online music store. From 1960 until 2006, Tower operated retail stores in the United States, which closed when Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. Tower.com was purchased by a separate entity and was not affected by the retail store closings. The corporate name was MTS Inc., but this was little-known compared to the much more widely recognized Tower Records.
In 1960, Russell Solomon opened the first Tower Records store on Watt Avenue, in Sacramento, California. He named it for his father's drugstore, which shared a building and name with the Tower Theater, where Solomon first started selling records. By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to Tower Records. In 1995, Tower.com opened, making the enterprise one of the first retailers to move online.
In addition to CDs and cassette tapes, the stores sold DVDs, electronic gadgets like mp3 players, video games, accessories, and toys, and a few Tower Records locations sold books as well, such as those in Brea, Mountain View, and Sacramento, California, as well as stores in Nashville, New York, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle.
Seven years after its founding, Tower Records expanded to San Francisco, opening a store in what was originally a grocery store at Bay Street and Columbus Avenue. The chain eventually expanded internationally to include stores in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ireland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina. The Tower Records stores in Japan split off from the main chain and are now independent. Arguably the most famous Tower Records outlet was the purpose built building that company staff general-contracted, with many personally contributing their labor, which opened in 1971 on the north west corner of Sunset Boulevard and Horn Avenue in West Hollywood.
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