[bitwize]

I witnessed Tower Records asplode in 2007 in graphic detail when a very large and very well-stocked Tower shop jn Portland, OR was forced to sell off every scrap of inventory (allowing me to stock up on Danger Mouse (the cartoon, not the DJ) DVDs, among other things).

Imagine my surprise when I landed in Osaka in 2011 and saw Tower Records still very much a thing there.

[davidgerard]

Dangerous Minds has a somewhat ranty article going into precisely how the majors destroyed the record business in the late 1990s:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_rise_and_fall_of_towe...

That said, they had some idea what they were doing: they cut the least profitable 25% of their artists and SKUs, dropping unit sales by 4.1%, then blamed "piracy":

http://web.archive.org/web/20030113094231/http://www.azoz.co...