By Neil Johnson njohnson@gazettextra.com February 21, 2022
JANESVILLE
Monday might not go down as the day the music finally sputtered out and died in Janesville, but the city’s one remaining record store soon will be gone.
The Exclusive Company, a long-running, Wisconsin-based independent record store chain, announced Monday it will permanently close its store at 1259 Milton Ave.
The shop is one of six the company has run in Wisconsin since owners launched the first Exclusive Company record store in West bend in 1956.
On Monday, the Janesville store was closed while a liquidation company and store employees readied for a blowout sale to clear out the thousands of vinyl albums, CDs, movies and assorted items still in stock.
On the outside of the white, cinder block storefront, liquidators had tattooed the shop with blazing yellow signs that advertise the store’s last stand in stark black letters. It’s a massive sale that, according to one of the placards, will “liquidate to the bare walls.”
On the wall around the corner, painted mural faces of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan cast doleful, thousand-yard stares at a parking lot that sat empty except for a few customers who had heard of the closure and jumped the gun on a sale that actually doesn’t start until today, according to store ads.
The closure comes a few months after the store’s founder, James Giombetti, died in November.
Bob Maloney, a liquidator whose Oconto Falls company, Midcentral Sales, is handling the inventory clearout, said Giombetti’s relatives inherited the company, and the family decided after a few months to shutter the Janesville store.
It will remain open until the liquidation is finished, and that’ll be it, Maloney said while standing outside the locked store Monday afternoon in Janesville.
Janesville’s store, which the company has leased at its current Milton Avenue location for 20 years, is considered a geographic outlier, a company official told The Gazette on Monday.
It’s the farthest-flung of the company’s seven Wisconsin stores, the rest of which are clustered in the Fox Valley, Milwaukee and that city’s suburban communities.
Barb Anthony, an office manager in Exclusive Company’s Oshkosh corporate headquarters, said in an interview that The Exclusive Company’s owners haven’t yet decided whether they intend to liquidate and close any of the other six locations, but she said one of the company’s Milwaukee stores might get bought out by a store employee.
Anthony said the main reason the Janesville store’s closure comes now is that it’s the most distant location in the independent company’s supply chain.
“It’s a haul to get supplies to them. That’s the issue with that store,” Anthony said. “Not necessarily because it’s not a good local location or anything; it’s done well, sales-wise. It’s just not you know, it’s just it’s because up here in the (Fox) Valley, we can move products so much quicker from one store to another. There’s a big lag between us and our Janesville store. So the decision was made to just let it go.”
Anthony said vinyl record sales are now the lifeblood of the few remaining independent record stores in the U.S.
The music industry has shifted dramatically over the last two decades, first toward digital music purchases and more recently toward streaming music services. Yet industry analysts say vinyl records have become a growing bright spot in hard-copy music sales in the last five years.
It’s just that, now, amid growing demand in the COVID-19/Amazon era, the few record pressing plants in existence are having trouble matching supply with growing demand. That has strained independent outfits like The Exclusive Company, which manages its own inventory, from sourcing newly released music to shuffling special orders to its stores statewide.
Maloney, the liquidator, called the Janesville closure “the end of an era.”
He compared the liquidation to closures that have happened in recent years to mom-and-pop bookstores and hardware stores.
“Maybe if somebody wants to buy a place like this? For what, I don’t know $750,000 or something. That’s probably what it would take to make it work,” Maloney said, although he didn’t seem quite convinced of his own sentiment.
“You might spend that kind of money to make $40,000 a year and work 80 hours a week,” he said.
Fort Atkinson resident John Danielson, one customer who arrived at The Exclusive Company on Monday afternoon, stood in the parking lot talking to another customer who said he had just ordered a new record from the store.
Danielson said he was “bummed” and “saddened” to learn of the closure. He said the Janesville shop is the closest record store to his hometown, and it’s one of just a few that remain in southern Wisconsin.
He came to Janesville hoping to score a few vintage pressings of 1990s-era industrial metal albums by the Chicago rock act Ministry. He said the Janesville Exclusive Company always had rare and out-of-print rock albums that he couldn’t find elsewhere.
Danielson said he’ll miss hanging at The Exclusive Company; digging through old CDs, vinyls and movies for hours; and then driving back home listening to whatever new tunes he bought. It’s a place he spends hundreds of dollars a year, but soon, no more.
“I turn 45 years old tomorrow, so I’m the old guy who still loves CDs and vinyl, and I don’t care,” Danielson said. “I want to know where each album was recorded, who are the band members, what the song words are, I want to see all the pictures on the record sleeves because all that is time and effort the artist took to get it together. That’s versus, like, ‘Oh, here’s the song on digital!’
“I want to hold onto the real albums, the real music, as long as I can.”
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