Everything Must Come Back?: Owner Of Tower Brand Planning To Open Actual Record Stores

Today’s bit of surprising news in music retail: The CEO of the the London-based online merchant Caiman–which now owns all the branding related to the liquidated record-store behemoth Tower Records–has announced that his company will revive the brand, even opening (gasp!) a few brick-and-mortar record stores:

Online merchant Caiman Inc., which acquired the bankrupt Tower Records’ logo, Tower.com and the company’s intellectual property for $4.2 million in a March bankruptcy auction, has big plans for the brand.

That’s the word from Caiman Inc. CEO Didier Pilon, who said he plans to relaunch Tower.com as well as open brick-and-mortar superstores in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco within nine months. In fact, Pilon has turned to some experts to help revive the Tower brand, hiring former Tower purchasing executive George Scarlet as director of entertainment purchasing for the company and former Tower buyer Kevin Hawkins.

The company, which buys mainly from one-stops and some independent distributors, hopes to convert to buying direct from all independent distributors and the majors and, where appropriate, the labels themselves, sources said.

We’re skeptical that this new Tower is going to launch in nine months (they’ll need to buy back a lot of Field Mob CDs in a very short time), but we do, cautiously, think that the scaled-back superstore plan could work–after all, our earliest ventures to Tower came when the store was still something of a tourist attraction, thanks to its vaster-than-the-mall selection and urban location. We’ll be watching this story, but for now, a suggestion for Pilon: If you can, get that Lincoln Center location before TJ Maxx does–after all, $29.99 shorts don’t go well with operawear at all.

Caiman rebuilds Tower, plans superstores [Hollywood Reporter]