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Today’s bit of surprising news in music retail: The CEO of the the London-based online merchant Caiman–which now owns all the branding related to the liquidated record-store behemoth Tower Records–has announced that his company will revive the brand, even opening (gasp!) a few brick-and-mortar record stores:
Online merchant Caiman Inc., which acquired the bankrupt Tower Records’ logo, Tower.com and the company’s intellectual property for $4.2 million in a March bankruptcy auction, has big plans for the brand.
That’s the word from Caiman Inc. CEO Didier Pilon, who said he plans to relaunch Tower.com as well as open brick-and-mortar superstores in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco within nine months. In fact, Pilon has turned to some experts to help revive the Tower brand, hiring former Tower purchasing executive George Scarlet as director of entertainment purchasing for the company and former Tower buyer Kevin Hawkins.
The company, which buys mainly from one-stops and some independent distributors, hopes to convert to buying direct from all independent distributors and the majors and, where appropriate, the labels themselves, sources said.
We’re skeptical that this new Tower is going to launch in nine months (they’ll need to buy back a lot of Field Mob CDs in a very short time), but we do, cautiously, think that the scaled-back superstore plan could work–after all, our earliest ventures to Tower came when the store was still something of a tourist attraction, thanks to its vaster-than-the-mall selection and urban location. We’ll be watching this story, but for now, a suggestion for Pilon: If you can, get that Lincoln Center location before TJ Maxx does–after all, $29.99 shorts don’t go well with operawear at all.
Caiman rebuilds Tower, plans superstores [Hollywood Reporter]
I can see it now…you walk into Tower expecting racks of CDs and lo and behold…computer kiosks with iPod docks! It’s all digital downloads!
There’s been worse. Anyway, this kinda sounds like an attempt to go the Amoeba route.
Meanwhile, Russ Solomon wants to open a shop called Resurrection Records at the original Tower Records site in Sacramento. I’m looking forward to the $19.99 EPs.
It’s funny, Tower (at least in NYC) was kind of an early ’80s superstore before anyone had coined the term “superstore.”
At this point, to compete with the likes of Virgin – which is devoting ever-lesser space to music – they’d really have to expand floor space and include an event space for frequent live shows, if they expect it to become a “destination.”
Is this Caiman related to the shitty rip-off reseller on Amazon, Caiman.com?
@mackro:
I was wondering the same thing-I’d ordered CDs a couple times that never showed before I wised up…