College-Town Record Stores Shuttering

There's one other thing you need, and it's getting harder to find: a local record store. The kind of place with poster-covered walls, tattoo-covered customers, and an indie-rock aficionado at the cash register, somebody in a retro T-shirt who helps you navigate the store's eclectic inventory.

A few years ago on just one block of Chapel Hill's Franklin Street, the main drag in what's been called America's ideal college town, four or five such places catered both to locals and University of North Carolina students.

But with the demise of Schoolkids Records, the last one is gone. Schoolkids had planned to gut it out through March, but couldn't even make through its final week and shut down Saturday. It's just the latest victim in an industry hit by rising college-town rents, big-box retailers, high CD prices, and most importantly a new generation of college students for whom music has become an entirely online, intangible hobby they often don't have to pay for.

Chapel Hill is hardly alone. In recent years, perhaps hundreds of independent and small-chain record stores in college towns have shut down or consolidated as music downloading all but eliminated the demand for them.

In State College, Pa., Arboria and Vibes have closed. Iowa City, Iowa, used to have BJ's, Sal's Music Emporium and Real Records.

Boulder, Colo., has lost at least a half dozen Cheapo Discs, All the Rage, Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes, and others. Albums on the Hill, a holdout across from the University of Colorado's campus, is down from 18 full-time employees to three part-timers.

"I'm just trying to decide when I'm going to go online and close my brick and mortar," said Greg Gabbard, owner of City Lights Records in State College, near Penn State's campus. "I'm trying to stay here as long as I can because I love the people. We're all teachers."

Big record chains aren't doing much better. But somehow, customers never seem to miss them as much when they close down.

"You walk down the hall of the dorm and hear everything possible, and you will be influenced by all these people," said Ric Culross, who managed Schoolkids and has been in the business 35 years. "They've come to a store such as ours to feed off of that, just like they go into a bookstore."