Times are tough for brick-and-mortar record stores, but you wouldn’t know it watching the continued growth of Arizona-based chain Zia Record Exchange.
The company—founded more than 25 years ago in Phoenix—has announced that it will add a second Las Vegas location, at 4511 W. Sahara Ave., to its 2-year-old store at 4225 S. Eastern Ave.
The new Zia, set to open around late October, will stage in-store concerts and screen independent films by local video artists, along with buying and selling new and used CDs, DVDs, vinyl albums and other related merchandise. “We wanted to establish a spot on the west side of the Strip,” chain general manager Brian Faber says. “While the store on Eastern was a good fit for the community [near UNLV], we wanted to duplicate what we did there and do it on the west side. If we do a good store on that side of town, it should do the neighborhood a lot of good.”
That neighborhood—in which the defunct Tower Wow store used to reside—is primarily a patchwork of apartments and mid-to-low-income housing, but Faber believes the new Zia will attract music-buying consumers from the Lakes and Summerlin, folks who otherwise might not have made the long trek to Zia’s Eastern location.
In the age of digital downloads, however, it will be interesting to see whether Zia, already dominating a market largely devoid of independent record stores, can sustain a second location without oversaturating an increasingly smaller music-buying market. Faber, who watched the Zia chain swell from one to seven stores in Arizona, doesn’t sound worried.
“Each store is different and has a different flavor and presentation to it,” Faber says.
“We market ourselves as a different kind of retailer. We don’t set up things with focus-grouped designs to get people in and out of the store. Our plan is to deliver an eclectic mix of product, and when you boil it all down, we’re a neighborhood record store. We don’t gear to the tourists; we gear towards the people who like to walk into our store on a regular basis.”