When Jim Spitznagel walked away from Jim's Records, one of the best independent record stores in Pittsburgh, in 1993, Paul Olszewski stepped in to keep it alive as Paul's Compact Discs.
Now, the owner of the well-stocked boutique store on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield is ready to call it quits.
"There are multiple reasons," he says. "The building is for sale and I doubt they're going to keep the rent the same."
The more compelling reason is the sharp decline of CD sales in the age of digital.
"August was the worst month ever in the history of the store," he says. And that was not an aberration. It has been the trend for a while.
Mr. Olszewski says he's going to order new releases until the end of the year, and then start clearing out the store in the late winter, early spring. He doesn't have a set closing date for Paul's.
This won't mean the end of music shopping on Liberty Avenue. Longtime employee Karl Hendricks said Thursday that he will open a similar store, either at the same location or another one in Bloomfield, by April. He asks that customers go to Paul's Compact Discs page on Facebook and hit "like" to get updates.
Paul's CDs, and Jim's before that (which dated back to 1976), carved out a niche in the record store market by stocking a large selection of indie music, spanning rock, jazz, blues, folk and experimental. Much of it, from such labels as Merge, Matador and Sub Pop, could not be found in mainstream stores. It also offers used vinyl and CDs, imports, magazines, DVDs and major-label releases that appeal to the music connoisseur. You could not walk into Paul's and buy the new Britney Spears record, despite some demand for such Top 40 releases in the community.
The Pittsburgh area has a healthy selection of indie retailers with Eide's (Downtown), Mind Cure (Polish Hill), Dave's Music Mine (South Side), the Attic (Millvale), Stedeford's (North Side) and Jerry's Records (Squirrel Hill), which specializes in vinyl.
First Published: September 29, 2011, 4:45 p.m.