He may be fuzzy on the exact date, but Andy Schneidkraut — owner of Boulder’s Albums on the Hill — can’t forget that night in 1994.
Hundreds of fans poured down the stairs into his basement-level shop, eager to snatch up brand-new CDs released at midnight by hometown heroes Big Head Todd & The Monsters and the about-to-explode Dave Matthews Band.
“That night, I sold more CDs than I sell now in six months,” says a wistful Schneidkraut, presiding over his empty record store on a recent afternoon.
Music retail in Boulder County is now nearly unrecognizable from that 1990s heyday, a CD-fueled bonanza that peaked when — by Schneidkrautap count — there were 18 different record stores operating in Boulder alone.
Today, following the , there are only two dedicated record shops left in Boulder, and just three in the whole county.
Digital streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music now rule the consumer market, and the But itap vinyl — which never quite made it to the dustbin of music-format history — thatap helping sustain those remaining brick-and-mortar retailers.
As sales of new vinyl slowly tick upward in this decidedly digital era, record stores are once again exactly that: stores that primarily sell records.
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