The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History

Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College, USA. As a former rock critic for Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, she was an early advocate of the genre now known as grunge. She is the author of Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, (2003), Punk In the Present Tense, (1997) and Exile In Guyville, (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as Rock Crowds And Power. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.

John Dougan is Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, Spin, All Music Guide, American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, Salon, and Perfect Sound Forever. He is the author of The Who Sell Out (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Mistakes of Yesterday, The Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

Christine Feldman-Barrett is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia, and is a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. She is the author of A Women's History of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2021) and 'We are the Mods': A Transnational History of a Youth Subculture (2009), and the editor of Lost Histories of Youth Culture (2015). She has published on topics of youth culture history in various collected volumes and in the Journal of Youth Studies, Space and Culture, Popular Music and Society, and Feminist Media Studies.

Matthew Worley is Professor of modern history at the University of Reading, UK. His more recent work has concentrated on the relationship between youth culture and politics in Britain, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. He is the author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-1984 (2017) and co-founder of the Subcultures Network.