Longtime manager becoming owner of three Turn It Up! music stores

MONTAGUE — As Turn It Up! approaches its 30th anniversary, the music store is falling into the hands of a new, but not unfamiliar, owner.

Founders Patrick Pezzati and Chandra Hancock are selling the business, which has locations in Montague, Northampton and Brattleboro, Vermont, to longtime manager Carson Arnold, whose familiarity with the shop dates back to when he was a patron at just 10 years old.

“In all honesty, this was always a dream job for me,” Arnold said in advance of taking ownership on Monday, Nov. 24. “So I’m kind of pinching myself right now a little bit as we inch closer toward it.”

From 10-year-old music buff, Arnold joined the Brattleboro location of Turn It Up! as an assistant manager in 2004. He gained 21 years of experience as a manager between the Brattleboro store and the Keene, New Hampshire, location before it closed in 2018.

The idea for Arnold to take over is not a new development, though. Arnold said the idea that he would one day own the store has been floated around since the closure of the Keene location and since the start of the pandemic. In the few years since the idea surfaced, Arnold said he’s thankful that he’s been able to “fine-tune” how the store is moving forward. Pezzati will serve as a consultant for five years to help Arnold as he transitions into this new chapter, along with the 12 other employees across the three stores.

Pezzati said Arnold taking over the store is a natural progression. With Pezzati and his wife now 62 years old, and Arnold now 40, Pezzati thinks this is an appropriate time to shift ownership to start the next phase of their lives. Pezzati said he and Hancock look forward to having more time to spend with family and to travel.

“He’s obviously been part of the fabric for 21 years, which is 70% of the time we’ve been in business,” Pezzati said of Arnold. “So it just made sense and we’re happy that it’s that worked out that way.”

The store’s first location, in Northampton, opened on Nov. 24, 1995. In reflecting on owning the business for nearly 30 years, Pezzati said he’s proud to have sustained Turn It Up! through industry changes, especially through the mid-2000s when the prevalence of digital media was growing. He owes the comeback of Turn It Up! and other physical media stores to the new interest in physical media brought on by younger generations — a customer base he hopes Arnold will continue to see.

“Without the young people, it would probably just continue to decline. Instead, we’re actually seeing sales increases and are actually doing very well,” he explained.

Pezzati is also proud of the growth of Turn It Up!, which started out with just a few boxes of CDs and VHS tapes and has now supplied around 5 million records, tapes and discs to customers across the region.

Echoing Pezzati, Arnold said he’s seen demand for more niche items like vinyl records be embraced by younger generations. In keeping up with market trends, the stores have also been selling accessories and merchandise on top of their usual sales of physical media.

When asked about how media stores have changed over the last few decades, and how Turn It Up! has been able to stay open and maintain multiple locations, Arnold said having a diversified stock of music, movies, accessories and more has helped the stores thrive.

“Just going back into the mid-2000s, we started really developing a pretty core movie collector crowd,” Arnold said. “There’s actually a lot of folks who shop in our stores just solely for movies and not music. So there’s definitely a different kind of cross-pollinating markets that we have throughout all our locations.”

Additionally, having a team of employees dedicated to the store and infusing their own creativity into the business, and not being afraid to try new things, has helped Turn It Up! maintain itself through different eras.

“It’s important to be willing to try things, and certainly be honest when things don’t always work out and kind of move on,” Arnold said.

Looking to the future, there are some goals Arnold is hoping to meet as the new owner. One of the more short-term goals is having a chance to be at the Montague location throughout the winter to see about potentially having different hours, as the Montague store is only open from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, while both the Brattleboro and Northampton locations have open hours seven days a week. Arnold also hopes to offer more in-person performances at the stores and change up some of the artistic designs at the Brattleboro location.

Another opportunity Arnold wants to explore is creating a database of the media sold in stores as part of stock management, along with keeping up with a buying policy that is less of a “pick-and-choose” policy, but rather one that embraces as much diversity as possible.

“I try to look at the goal over a long period of time, and try to do a lot of things that are more small in the beginning that add up to a bigger picture in the end,” Arnold said of his thought process on guiding the business into the future.

Turn It Up! is located at 5 Pleasant St. in Northampton, 440 Greenfield Road in Montague and 85 Main St. in Brattleboro.