Amoeba Music

New York Times

By Marc Weingarten

While the recording industry grapples with the issue of widespread downloading of copyrighted music, an independent record store in Los Angeles is trying to make the digital revolution work on its own terms.

Amoeba Music, a 31,000-square-foot store on Sunset Boulevard that opened in November, has an inventory of about 800,000 CD’s, LP’s, cassette tapes and eight-tracks, some of them used. The selection at Amoeba, which calls itself "the largest indie record store on the planet," can dizzy even the most ardent browser wondering which 70’s Nigerian Afropop compilation to buy.

To guide customers through the musical labyrinth, the store’s owners spent about $200,000 to install 17 custom-designed listening stations where potential buyers can hear digital music files in the same MP3 format used to trade millions of files through services like Napster.

About 12,000 CD’s, or 120,000 MP3 tracks, can be heard in their entirety. The hand-picked MP3 files are stored on two servers, and 200 new tracks are uploaded weekly.

Customers can choose a CD from the store’s rack, scan the bar code, and listen to the tracks before deciding whether to buy. They can also browse the files by style or artist.

The listening stations, which were built by Jeffrey Schier, an Oakland programmer, are found only in Amoeba’s Los Angeles store. The company also has stores in San Francisco and Berkeley.

"We wanted to create a tool to educate everybody and highlight stuff that isn’t usually highlighted," said Marc Weinstein, who owns the store with Karen Pearson, David Prinz, and Mike Boyder. "We wanted it to be like some crazy record freak’s record room."

While listening stations at big retailers like the Virgin Megastore are paid for by big record labels and tend to highlight a handful of new CD’s selected by those companies, Amoeba’s MP3 stations feature a wide swath of current and older music selected by the store’s employees.

Karisten Frederick, a buyer for Amoeba who is the Los Angeles store’s de facto information technology manager, was critical of the constraints imposed by conventional listening stations. "Buyers don’t have the freedom to turn people on to something new, and indie labels can’t afford to do it," she said.

By placing rack displays of new releases by independent labels near its listening stations, Amoeba has seen spikes in sales of the kind music it seeks to promote. "We got together and said, ‘What’s underexposed?’" Ms. Pearson said, "‘What isn’t heard out there in the world?’"

Although Amoeba’s MP3 stations are as cutting-edge as retail record-selling gets, Mr. Weinstein prefers to look at the idea as a throwback to friendlier days of records buying.

"In the 50’s, Wallach’s Music City, a record store that used to be a block from Amoeba, had listening stations where they would just rip the shrink-wrap off of any album that a customer wanted to hear," he said. "That’s the way we want to sell records. We’re really just an anachronism. This is old-school retail."