No Music No Life Tee (SOLD OUT)

ORDERS OPEN: 9/1/25
ORDERS CLOSE: 9/8/25
TO PRINT: 9/9/25

PRINTED ON LAA GD1801 GOLDEN YELLOW TEES.

ALL ITEMS TAKE BETWEEN 3-4 WEEKS TO PRODUCE AFTER THE ORDER PERIOD ENDS. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages.

Long before paid music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, record superstores like Tower Records dominated the retail half of the recorded music industry. But after its second bankruptcy and liquidation in 2006, Tower Records in America is no more. Russ Solomon was born in Sacramento, CA in 1925. As a thirteen-year-old, he worked in his father’s drug store in the Tower Theater building in Sacramento. Soloman’s father began selling records in the drug store in 1941, soon expanding to an empty room adjacent to the drug store that they called “Tower Record Mart.”

Solomon began pressuring his father to expand the business. Instead, Solomon ended up buying Tower Record Mart from his father in 1952 to expand on his own, but the business was undercapitalized and ended up being liquidated by his distributors. In 1960, Solomon reopened his business and then created Tower North as a second location—financed with a $5,000 loan from his father. Around this time, he rebranded Tower Record Mart to Tower Records—with a new logo and a Shell Oil Company-themed red and yellow color scheme. In 1968, Solomon spotted the building for his future Tower Records San Francisco location while having a post-hangover brunch across the street with a woman he was partying with the previous night. He transformed the property—a 6,000 square foot former Chinese grocery store—into a record store that was gigantic by the standards of the day.

Tower Records opened its first Los Angeles location in 1970 on Sunset Boulevard. The location was not far from many famous recording artists and record labels, making it the preferred hangout for many of the music industry’s tastemakers. The Sunset location was giant: the 1974 Guinness Book of Records listed it as the largest record store in the world. In 1979, Tower first turned to international expansion by establishing a wildly successful footprint in Japan. Tower’s success in Japan would whet Solomon’s appetite for international expansion. Later on, in an interview, Solomon reflected that they tragically “weren’t really successful in any of the other countries [they] went into.”

In 1990, Russ Solomon made Forbes Magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans at #335, pegging his net worth at $310 million based on an estimate of Tower Records’ parent company’s private market valuation. In June 1995, Tower Records launched the first online music store on AOL, registering nearly $200,000 in sales that December. A year later, they launched the music store tower.com. CNNMoney—in a November 2000 piece—even described tower.com as once being a dotcom IPO candidate. Despite these forward-looking moves, Solomon seemingly never believed that physical CD sales were threatened and never made serious investments into a digital-first music world. In 1998, Tower pursued a plan that would eventually contribute to its undoing: they borrowed $110 million in bonds to finance aggressive international expansion.

In 1999, Tower was forced by its creditors to pay off debt by selling its profitable Japanese stores. Tower’s revenue that year had reached a peak of around $1 billion dollars. Sales had continually grown since Tower’s founding in 1960 but finally began to flatten around 2000. In September 2002, Tower was one of the defendants that agreed to a $143 million price-fixing settlement with 41 US states and three US commonwealths. The settlement was part of a two-year investigation into “minimum advertised price” schemes where music distributors agree to pay for retailers’ advertising costs for CDs in exchange for retailers not advertising discounts on those CDs.

In 2004, Tower filed for bankruptcy partially because they could not make a $5.2 million payment on the $110 million they borrowed. Bondholders forgave millions of dollars in debt in exchange for an 85% stake in the company, leaving Russ Solomon and his family with the remainder. By 2005, Tower’s revenue had fallen from $1 billion a year to $430 million per year. In August 2006, Tower filed for bankruptcy for a second time. The retail liquidation firm Great American Group won a two-day bankruptcy auction in October 2006 with a bid of $134.3 million, announcing its plan to liquidate all Tower Records assets to pay off creditors who were owed about $210 million in total. All inventory was to be sold and all US stores were to be closed. Solomon emailed his staff, “The fat lady has sung. … She was off-key. Thank you, Thank you, Thank You.”

The rise and fall happened so quickly both Solomon and fans of Tower had whiplash. Fans and diehards were on top of the world and falling with Tower simultaneously. Today, Tower Records’ Japanese stores continue to live on. Because they were sold in 1999, they were not on the liquidation chopping block in 2006. Furthermore, there continues to be a brisk demand for physical media in the Japanese music market.