College-Town Record Stores Shuttering

But these days, most just go online. Culross said he'd hoped this year's freshmen might arrive with a revived passion for CDs and even vinyl albums, which have experienced a minor resurgence. It turns out many have never even bought a single non-digital one.

College students are the perfect market for music downloads. They have low incomes, small living quarters and endless bandwidth.

The change may be an economic inevitability, but still a loss. Colleges talk a lot about diversity, but you often find more of it browsing record stores near campus than in the cafeteria. Customers are black and white, well off and poor. You'll find cool high school kids next to older collectors, professors and students ranging from straight-laced pre-professionals to punk rockers.

"This is one of the few places I can consistently find things I'm interested in," David Crotts said as he flipped through CDs at Schoolkids' going-out-of-business sale recently. An MBA student at UNC, he first shopped at Schoolkids when he was a teenager in nearby Burlington. He has about 500 CDs, but most people he knows just download music.

"It's not surprising, but it's disappointing," he said. "You can't come into a place like this that has atmosphere anymore."

Nearby, as his wife thumbed a CD by a group called Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Timothy Shelly, who works for a catering company, complained about his recent shopping experience in one of the big chain stores.

"Even in their specialty heavy metal section, they didn't even have Black Sabbath," he said disgustedly.

In a town like Chapel Hill, with a good music scene, record stores also have been venues. Over the years, several bands played on a tiny stage behind Schoolkids' front window, including Tom Tom Club, a Talking Heads offshoot, and John Mayer, before he moved up the ladder to clubs and now arenas.

Like most such places, Schoolkids' walls were lined with posters Nirvana, James Dean, Led Zeppelin, the Breeders. The rock shelves ran from Aberdeen City to Neil Young. Biggest sellers over the years ranged from groups such as Pink Floyd and Pixies to jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Latin albums including "Buena Vista Social Club," Culross said.

At their peak, around 2000, the five or so stores on the block did around $250,000 worth of business each month, he said. By the end, it was under $50,000. U.S. album sales have plummeted, declining 15 percent in 2007, while digital album sales rose more than 50 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.