Tower Records
former retail music chain based in Sacramento, California
Tower Records is an international retail franchise and online music store that was formerly based in Sacramento, California, United States. From 1960 until 2006, Tower operated retail stores in the United States, which closed when Tower Records filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. Tower Records was purchased by a separate entity and was not affected by the retail store closings.
On November 13, 2020, Tower Records announced that it had returned as an online retailer with plans to open future physical locations.
History
Inception, expansion, and description
In 1960, Russell Solomon opened the first Tower Records store on Broadway, in Sacramento, California. He named it after his father's drugstore, which shared a building and name with the Tower Theatre, where Solomon first started selling records. The first stand-alone Tower Records store was located at 2514 Watt Ave in the Arden Arcade area of Sacramento. By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to another Sacramento Tower Records location. In 1995, Tower.com opened, making the enterprise one of the first retailers to move online.
Seven years after its founding, Tower Records expanded to San Francisco, opening a store in what was originally a grocery store at Bay Street and Columbus Avenue.
“Tower Records” enters the record as former retail music chain based in Sacramento, California. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tower, Records and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Tower Records” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tower, Records and former provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3265728. VIAF identifies the subject as 148077931. The Library of Congress control number is no2001058210. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2006, 2020 and 1976.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Tower Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.