Premium Sound, the little record store that could, closes up shop

What’s happening: Luke Stemmerman’s Premium Sound store inside Tip Top Market spun its final sale this week amid its best year financially.

• The independent bookstore it shared a space with, I’ve Read it in Books, packed up and closed, too.
• Tip Top, the easy-going market with craft beer and wine and local goods, is still open, thankfully.

Why it matters: Still, for regulars like me, the changes hit like a hard scratch in our favorite track.

• The combination of Tip Top + Premium Sound + I’ve Read it in Books — three independently owned businesses that shared the same space — gave us the divine trinity of music and books and beer.
• It was a communal space where you could spend an hour browsing alone in the peace and quiet, because everything you thumbed through had something to say.

Yes, but: This isn’t a funeral. Stemmerman will still be selling records at popups and in small, curated boxes set up at breweries and other businesses. You might see Premium Sound at flea markets. He wants to find ways to create parties around vinyl shopping, with DJs and beer. Follow Premium Sound’s social media to see where he lines up next.

• He isn’t closing the physical version of record store because the music died. He’s closing it because he couldn’t keep up, and he wanted a little of his life back.

By the numbers: There’s an art to good business; success is determined by more than just numbers. But still numbers matter, so here they are:

• When Stemmerman opened Premium Sound in Tip Top a little more than four years ago, he says he struggled to clear $1,000 a month in sales.
• This year, he’s been clearing $25,000 a month.
• Yes, in records.

The big picture: What was just hipster stuff in the 2000s and early 2010s has gone mainstream today, as record sales have exploded.

• In 2021, U.S. record sales eclipsed $1 billion for the first time since 1985, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

So why, then, would Stemmerman close a record store in this economy?

His costs kept rising with his revenue, and he never quite got to a place where he could quit his day job at Mood Media. So he was working 80 hours a week, and he knew that if he wanted to reclaim his life, he’d need to hire employees.

• And that felt like overcomplicating things with his first love, the music.

Backstory: As a teen growing up in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, he spent almost every day in a local shop called Love Garden Sounds. He’s 43 now, so this would’ve been in the 1990s, at the height of CDs, and when records were left for dead.

• But dance, hip-hop, punk and indie kept pressing vinyl. Hip-hop, especially. DJs around the country spun and spun. New artists used cheap-ol’ records nobody wanted anymore as a backdrop for new beats, and in the process they unearthed forgotten music from the 1960s and ’70s.
• Stemmerman loved all of those genres, and gathered as much as he could.
• One record led to another, and soon he had thousands, at a time when most of his peers were riding around with CD cases strapped around their sun visors.
• He took the collection when he moved to Chicago and then, in 2005, to Charlotte. When the movers showed up, he told them to put everything into their truck except the records. He and a friend drove those separately in his climate-controlled Mitsubishi SUV.

Reality check: Stemmerman will be the first to tell you he doesn’t fit in with the business culture that sits on Charlotte’s surface. He doesn’t interview well at banks, isn’t much on button-downs and ties.

• So as he approached middle age, he started asking himself, “Why do successful people succeed?”
• And soon he answered, “Because they do things they’re good at, things they know.”

“That’s when I realized that flipping through records and knowing what’s good and knowing how to talk about it is a skillset that I have that’s probably better than a lot of other people,” he says.

He also figured selling records would help him get rid of clutter. So he started doing popups around town, selling off pieces of his music journey. But a funny thing happens to people who are good at selling records — other people start selling them records, hoping to offload their own collections.

• Stemmerman bought the ones he liked, sold a few more, and soon the popups were so popular that one of the owners of Tip Top Market asked if he wanted to have a permanent place. He opened in April 2018.
• During the pandemic shutdowns, Tip Top was able to stay open because it’s essentially a convenience store, which made it essential. And because there was no door between Tip Top and Premium Sound, the record shop stayed open.

How it worked: He’s a human Pandora. People tell him what they like — mostly the famous stuff, “like Taylor Swift or whatever,” he says, — and he can steer them to someone else along those lines.

He also has one other skill: He doesn’t judge. He entering a record store is intimidating for newcomers.

“There’s a stigma with independent record store that most people who are new to it, you expect to be judged,” he says. “You think the people working the other side of the counter are snobby know-it-alls who think they know more than you do.

• “I wanted to make sure that was not felt at my shop.”

My thought bubble: It never was.

I know it’s silly to mourn a record store that’s been open for less than five years. This isn’t exactly like Ernest Tubb’s record shop in Nashville, which my Axios Nashville colleagues reported is closing after 71 years.

• But each year on my past couple of birthdays, I spent an hour or so at Tip Top and Premium Sound, wandering around with an afternoon beer surrounded by songs that will outlive me, in whatever format they take.
• I’ll miss Premium Sound, I suspect I’ll see it around again.