An Ode to Tower Records
Tuesday was always the new release day at Tower Records. It was such a routine for me, especially when I got my driver’s license in my junior year, to spend my Tuesday after school at the Tower Records on Lake Ave in Pasadena. That particular location had an escalator that led you to the expansive second floor filled with rows and rows of vinyls and cds. I usually head to the discovery stations - wired headphones, a pre-loaded 6 CD device that was the portal into all sorts of aural creations.
As a high schooler living in the suburbs of SoCal, this was my travel into sounds that I wouldn’t otherwise encounter through the local radio stations. I discovered everything and anything from Sonny Rollins to Bad Religion to Sigur Ros, this was my version of crate digging. The weekly visits to my local Tower Records became a ritual: an exploration of the untapped, the elation of new, and a haul to savor. While I now discover most of my music through digital platforms and by following online curators, I still visit record stores when I travel and bring back a vinyl or two for my collection.
The algorithm creation on the digital platforms touts personalization, but becomes formulaic based on my most recent listens. I lose my ability to find a new jazz artist while edm has dominated my most listening minutes. One can argue that the personal curation on digital platforms is better than the curation that I would otherwise find by simply exploring a record store in person? As our society contemplates, or rather sprint, towards AI-enabled knowledge, I fear that we are settling for mediocrity rather than the complex knowledge honed, curated, and distilled over time.
Innovators face the same scale challenges as musicians. Why do some bands achieve mass fame while others never exit the dark basement room of a dingy local venue? Many musicians create for creation’s sake. They are not interested in tuning their sound to appeal to the masses. The means of creation is enough as the experience. That same set, created for creation's sake, can paradoxically achieve mass fame (see attached graph). The elements of that music creation resonate perfectly with the taste of the consumers in that moment.
Can we understand the alchemy one versus the other, or predict this level of success? Let’s look at Fred Gibson, better known as Fred Again or just Fred. He is a classically trained musician who grew up next to Brian Eno and started by producing other musicians’ work. During the lockdown, his signature sound was layers of beats and melody around vocal elements taken from a virtual call or a physical interaction that brought the raw emotions of that time period. If you dissect his current success, he took the concepts of scarcity and human need to physically connect in building a music community that transcends cultural constructs. His recent USB project brought together millions in warehouse spaces that were composed of social media clues for location announcement, art installation, and surprise collaborators. His creative authenticity is just what the world needs today.
For many founders, the sweet spot is the creative journey of taking an idea to fruition and achieving market success. Can’t forecast on market readiness, but the ability to float to the top right is the sustained legacy that most founders even go on the journey.
My music taste continues to evolve. I am digging into my own years of listening crates in addition to discovering new ones. Often, I pull up a favorite from my medical training days (Elgar’s cello concerto in e minor), my operating room playlists, roadtrips over the years. I have listened to many disparate genres that often I can recognize a beat, a phrasing, or a melody that is of a previous influence. My inner record collection makes up who I am and no algorithm can replace that. Just like life, we start to recognize the patterns that impact our senses, decision-making, and action. How we choose to behave when we recognize these patterns shapes us. It is easy to become too analytical of these patterns with age, and lose the meaning of the experience. Individual songs bring back emotions of a time, genres fill the themes of each life phase, and the collective is my life story. I am in the midst of a third career pivot, taking the elements of previous ones and giving it a new remix.
In certain sectors, particularly education and healthcare, the pace of innovation outpace the human capacity for change. The creative destruction is upon us in healthcare driven by the demand for a better experience for all. How we listen, receive, and remix it is on us and as both consumer and operator in healthcare, I am ready to take that challenge on.
While Tower Records in the U.S. no longer exists, the nine story Tower Records in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo continues to be a booming business. While the best selling genre (currently KPOP) and the experience has evolved from just headphone stations to a craft beer hall with a DJ event space, it continues to be a mecca of nostalgia and new cultural trends for music nerds like me: talk about a sustained legacy that has adopted well, the new.