The Unabridged History of Other Peoples Music
The complete story

When I was a wee lad, I can still remember having a little record player of my very own and my parents used to buy 45 RPMs for me all the time. As a toddler and preschooler, I had already amassed a collection of records that could not be beat...well, it certainly couldnt be beat by any other toddlers in the neighborhood. I had "Day Tripper" by The Beatles and "These Boots Were Made For Walkin'" by Nancy Sinatra. I had records by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass. I was one hip little dude!

As a kid, my collection of records evolved to include LPs. My parents started buying me albums by The Osmonds and The Partrige Family. I remember one day, my Mom went shopping and tried to find a record with an old song my Grandpa used to sing, called "Smoke On The Water." To her dismay, the LP she brought home did not include the song she thought she was getting, however I became the benefactor of one heckuva classic LP called, Machine Head by Deep Purple! Another time, my Mom took a chance and bought an album for me as a gift, because the name of the group was the same as our home town, Kokomo. The music was too weird for her, but Kokomo turned out to be part of the UK psychedelic scene of the late 60s and early 70s. About the same time, I learned of Elton John and received his Greatest Hits Volume 1 LP for my birthday.

By the time I was a 6th grader, a lot of my friends had record collections too. Some of them had 8-track collections. One of my friends swiped his older sister's records. That's when I started learning about Queen, Aerosmith, Peter Frampton, Kansas and one particular group that fascinated a lot of boys my age...KISS. I went home and told my Mom I wanted KISS Alive. It was a two LP set, so it was a big request back then. My Mom didn't know what KISS was. I remember she asked a neigbor mom up the street. She had a boy who was four years older than me. She said, "KISS? Oh dear." Awesome! MIsssion accomplished. Anyway, I got KISS Alive and played it to death. Over and over. This clearly marked the departure from listening to music Mom approved of to music Mom would never approve of...and just knowing that Mom didn't like it made it my own and it also made it more fun to listen to and enjoy. Once the door was open, come on in Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Styx and Black Sabbath.

There were two home town record stores that I frequented in high school, Aftermath Records and Obidiah's, both in Kokomo, IN. When I went away to college, I discovered this place in Cincinnati called Ozarka Record Exchange. It was a buy-sell-trade record shop. I couldn't think of anything more cool to do for a living, but I pursued a career as a graphic designer anyway. I kept going to concerts and buying records all the time. Back in Indianapolis, living in the Irvington neighborhood, an old movie theater became home to a series of concerts, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Joe Satriani, Lynch Mob, Ace Frehley and a few others. Next door was a vacant retail building with a sign on the door that said "For Rent". I called the number and no one ever answered. That was when I knew for certain that I wanted to own some kind of record shop. The theater/concert venue didn't last long before being turned into a hardware store and the building for rent eventually became, you guessed it, a record store that someone else opened. Never the less, the seed was planted. By the way, that music store was eventually in a lot of legal trouble for selling bootlegs and DJ mix tapes.

Fast-forward to 2004. I finally had the financial resources and a large inventory of used CD's to open my store. There were ups and downs in finding a location. Some landlords did not want a record business, because they associated it with crack pipes and such, which incidentally I never sold. Other landlords wanted me to have $100,000 of cash assets in the bank. I finally found a spot that I thought would work nicely, just south of 71st Street on Keystone Avenue in Indianapolis. There were a number of positive aspects about the location. It was around the corner from a nightclub that featured live music and hosted several regional concert productions. Slash had played there, as well as Concrete Blonde, Jonny Lang and several others. It was conveniently triangulated between other used and independent record stores, like Vibes, Indy CD & Vinyl and Missing Link.

I thought the business plan was smart too. I planned to be more selective in buying used CDs from my customers, but offer them better cash than anyone else in town. All my discs were priced about a buck cheaper than competition, except the discs that were out of print and hard to find. That's where I expected to make some money. I invested in a professional grade disc repair machine so that we could offer professional quality disc re-surfacing. In my opinion, the best service we offered our customers was a CD search service for really rare and hard to find CDs. There was no charge to locate the disc, but if the customer wanted us to get it for them, there was a profit center. There were scant few CDs I couldn't find and those were typically very obscure or in many cases, the disc never existed at all. I had a service network around the world to tap into and find just about anything. On top of that, I used EBAY, Amazon and other mainstream outlets that people either didn't have the time to investigate or preferred the convenience of shopping with me.

As with all small business start-ups, there were problems. Signage was a big part of that. There was supposed to be an illuminated sign on the building, above the store and an illuminated sign on a post near the street. The one above the store was completed and installed, but the electric service to the post sign had been interrupted and according to the electric company, only the landlord could place a work order. The landlord didn't exactly get around to addressing this and when he did, there were other things he wanted to tie into the project. On top of that, contractors would leave in frustration after meeting with him because he spoke limited english. The street post sign was eventually fixed but too late to be of benefit to my shop.

Driving business into the store was also a problem. I attribute this to a lot of things, but clearly the store hours of operation, a mistake I own, added to this problem. The store was closed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday through Sunday just wasn't enough. It turned out the location on Keystone was difficult to access from the northbound lane. Having already done it several times, I knew where to turn, but most people didn't. It also turned out that the night club around the corner started hosting local bands more and national acts less. Pretty soon they were home to battles of every garage band in the state and no national acts. People attending the battles had no money to spend. Then there was the whole download movement. Once people started downloading music, all CD sales suffered. Even though I thought by specializing in things that were hard to find the store would do OK, there was not a large enough niche to reasonably sustain a business. So, with consecutive months of poor sales starting in the beginning of 2005, the plan was clear: close the store. December had been a monsterous month, but January was not kind and February was a disaster. March and April followed the same trend and there were no signs of improvement anytime soon. The liquidation sale was set up to take a percentage off the ticket price of merchandise by 10% increments. That plan worked. The final weeks the store was open produced exceptional sales, which helped to offset the cost to escape the lease, terminate telephone service and electronic security service.

All of the remaining inventory was relocated back to my house and I started selling it off on EBAY.

Fast forward again. The store has been closed for some time. The legal paperwork was complete to shut it all down. Then, in a very strange and uncanny twist of events, Other Peoples Music, Inc. was erroneously sued in a case of mistaken identity in February 2000. Turns out that an investor bought the estate of Rick Danko. The Rick Danko of the Band. Famous for songs like, Up On Cripple Creek, The Weight and more. Other Peoples Music was named as one of several defendants in a lawsuit involving unpaid royalties. Of course this was a huge case of mistaken identity for us. Other Peoples Music in Indianapolis was in no way involved. Also, based on our type of business, we were not required to pay artist royalties, as a purveyor of used items. So we just needed to get our name removed from the lawsuit. That was easier said than done, so we secured legal representation and provided necessary documentation to exhonorate our company from the proceedings. With just a little internet research, it turns out there is another business entity operating outside the US, d.b.a. Other Peoples Music in Canada. Apparently they were the intended target of these legal proceedings.

Today, Other Peoples Music lives on, not as a buy-sell-trade CD business, but as an internet journal of music past times. Enjoy.