Published
Mon, May 9, 2016, 16:43
- The iconic record store, which opened in the East Village in 1995, will close its doors next month.
Other Music will close both its physical location and mail-order service on June 25th.
The modest East Village record shop has been selling independent and experimental music since 1995. Its former employees include both Panda Bear and Scott Mou, a Dial Records artist and current member of the Pantha Du Prince band. Co-founder Chris Vanderloo told the New York Times that, while sales have dropped by half since 2000, rent has more than doubled (their share of the building's property tax has increased greatly too).
"We still do a ton of business—probably more than most stores in the country," said Josh Madell, another co-owner, in the same NYT article. "It’s just the economics of it actually supporting us—we don’t see a future in it. We’re trying to step back before it becomes a nightmare."
Much of the city's music scene has been priced out of Manhattan in the last decade, and many of the surviving record shops are across the bridge in Brooklyn: Co-Op 87, Halcyon, Superior Elevation, Rough Trade and Academy Records, to name a few. "When we opened, Brooklyn was not even on the map really for music culture," Madell added. "Now that is definitely where you’re going to be.”