Sounds like longevity: Downtown Sounds celebrates 50 years in business in Northampton

NORTHAMPTON — When a local specialty business survives and thrives for five decades —especially after a pandemic and in the age of online shopping — there’s plenty of reason to celebrate. The Northampton music store Downtown Sounds is getting ready to do just that.

The longtime store will celebrate its 50th anniversary at Iron Horse on Monday, June 1, at 7 p.m, with a concert that will include Behold True Believers!, King Radio, Lonesome Brothers, Downtown Sounds Workers Cooperative Band and Klezamir.

“It’s exciting. It’s a privilege to get to be here to support the community, and we’re grateful that there are so many people here that continue to be loyal to the business, but also really appreciate the fact that they have a local establishment that’s not attached to any giant conglomeration or corporation,” said Aaron Borucki, a worker-owner who started working at Downtown Sounds at 17 and is now 39.

Former owner Joe Blumenthal opened the store at 21 Pleasant St. in 1976 under the name Basile TV & Music Shop, changing its name to Downtown Sounds the following year. He later purchased the bike store next door and knocked down a wall between the two, expanding the music store’s space.

When Blumenthal retired in 2019, the store became a worker-owned cooperative, which Borucki called “a move of necessity”: “No one of us could have done it on our own.” Now, four worker-owners — including Borucki, Tom Shea, Dave Trenholm, and Jason Carpenter — run the store. All of them are musicians, as are their five employees.

It wasn’t long before the business had to weather the pandemic. Though their in-person sales were limited by capacity rules, Borucki said the store could not keep up with the demand for instruments, microphones, computer recording equipment, keyboards and the like.

“We saw a huge swath of people either getting back into playing music or picking it up for the first time,” he said.

That demand, fueled by people who suddenly had time for creative pursuits, pushed them to start an online store, and online sales now represent about a third of their overall sales.

Downtown Sounds also brings in revenue from its lessons — about 200 students take lessons in the store’s basement from a roster of about 30 teachers — and from instrument and amplifier repairs.

As Borucki spoke, a regular named Elizabeth Kelly dropped off an old guitar for him to take a look at. After he checked it out, his verdict was, unfortunately, that it was “unplayable.” The bridge, he said, was “gonna fall off and take somebody’s eye out.” Kelly wasn’t bothered, though; she expected it might be unsalvageable.

Kelly plays guitar, piano, and drums; in fact, she takes drum lessons at Downtown Sounds. When asked what keeps her coming back, she replied, “the people — they’re wonderful, they really are. They’re very knowledgeable.”

It’s not just local musicians who patronize the store. Blumenthal recalled selling a guitar to Chuck Berry while Berry was in town to play a show at the Calvin Theater. Borucki once sold a vintage guitar to Kiefer Sutherland, who had a show at the Iron Horse. Caroline Rhea once popped her head into the store during a sidewalk sale, and Gary Clark Jr. visited last year and bought two guitars and an amplifier.

“Those professional musicians really appreciate this type of laid-back, very genuine kind of atmosphere,” Borucki said.

The atmosphere is a significant part of what keeps Downtown Sounds alive and thriving. During a recent Friday morning, about a dozen people were in the store, including a well-dressed older woman perusing books of sheet music, a young man playing what sounded like a Spanish melody on an acoustic guitar and another customer playing the chimes.

Employee Adam Ives said the fact that the store allows people to try instruments in person is a key factor in its longevity.

“Buying an instrument is a very personal purchase for a lot of people, and it usually requires a lot of attention to detail. … Once you get to the higher end of things, the things that really get changed and improved upon and spent a lot of time on start to become a lot smaller and harder to notice without really coming in and understanding what makes a $500 guitar different from a $5,000 guitar. You wouldn’t know unless you played one, really,” Ives said.

Besides that, it helps that the store offers “genuine old-school” instruction and lessons. “People don’t really want to learn an instrument online,” Ives said.

Even in a town that has seen other music-related spaces close, “There’s a place that supports creativity, and there are generations of musicians who live around here — kids who grow up with musician families,” Borucki said, “and so there’s always going to be that built-in artistic community here.”

Blumenthal said the key to a store like Downtown Sounds having staying power for decades is being able to do a lot of things reasonably well at the same time.

“You have to have the right stuff in your store to sell. … You have to price it fairly. You have to have people that know what they’re talking about when they talk to customers,” he said. “The most important thing of all is, you have to treat people right, and if you treat people right, they talk about it and other people come and want to do business with you.”

Blumenthal got his start in retail selling sporting goods at Sears Roebuck, which, at the time, had a no-questions-asked refund policy. He recalled a man who came in on a Thursday, bought a rowboat, an outboard motor, and a pair of oars, then brought them all back the next Tuesday — and, per the policy, got a full refund.

“You know that this guy went to every friend that he had [and said], ‘You wouldn’t believe what I did! I went to Sears. I bought a boat and a motor, and I took it to the lake on vacation. I brought it back at the end of the weekend, I got a full refund, so I got a boat for free! And so his friend who he’s talking to thinks, ‘Oh, if Sears was willing to do that for this [expletive], they probably will treat me right if I go and have a real problem.’ And it was true,” Blumenthal said.

“The kind of advertising that this guy did for Sears by bragging about what a [expletive] he was, you couldn’t buy that for any money,” he added, “and I always try to treat people right so that they would tell their friends, ‘If you want somebody to treat you fairly, go to Downtown Sounds.’ And I think my employees watched me do that, and I think they have the same kind of attitude towards the customers. As long as they do, that’s the most important thing.”