Grand River is full of some unique shops that you may miss if you aren't looking or listening close enough. If you listen more closely, though, you may hear that sweet familiar sound of vinyl.
Flat, Black & Circular located in East Lansing has been around for 40 years. If you couldn’t already guess by the name this place sells records and lots of them at that.
Manager Jon Howard has been working here for 25 years and says there are around ten thousand records in store! That doesn’t account for the thousands of CDs and cassette tapes they also provide.
This place all started because of an addiction to music. “The one true thing about us is we’ve always stuck with vinyl”, Howard says as describing why this store has been such a success.
Selling records can be a hard market because of technology. Howard says when Napster, (one of the first illegal downloading sites for music) was created, people started to dump their records and begin to forget about vinyl. Howard says, “Stick to your guns”, which is exactly what this store did.
They started gathering these abandoned records making a giant collection. Doing this gave this store something that other record stores don’t have, variety.
From hip-hop to rock to even Spanish flamenco guitar albums, this place has it all. There’s no wonder their slogan is, “An Infinite Variety”.
Michigan State student and vinyl enthusiast Dylan Hazelton says, “People think records have become obsolete, some of my friends don’t even know what a record is! But, I love that sound of vinyl it brings me back to when I was a child and my parents would play records. Without this store on campus, where would I go”?
Jon Howard takes pride in this shop and thanks music lovers for the success of and industry that died and came back to life.
