Flesh and blood

Troy Falk is a familiar face to many local music fans, especially those who collect music in physical formats. He worked at the defunct store Soundwave CDs for a dozen years, briefly at Recycled Records, and, for the last five years, has been the music manager at the recently relocated Sundance Books and Music.

Tell me about the new location.

The new location is a pretty splendid affair. It’s a very historic old building, built in 1906. It’s called the Levy Mansion. It’s owned by the Nevada Museum of Art, so they’re our landlords, and they’ve been terrific to work with. It’s a great new opportunity to do sorts of things that we weren’t able to do at the old place.

Like what?

Well, for example, on the music end of things, because we have a lot of rooms instead of one big empty space, we can compartmentalize things a little bit, so we’re able to kind of dig deeper into the music end of things than we did at the other store, as far as how we’re decorating the walls, and the kind of inventory and things that we’re carrying, and the overall atmosphere.

Does that mean more depth of catalog?

Deeper catalog. We’re now stocking—we’ve always special ordered vinyl, but now vinyl is an in-stock item. We can still obviously special order it, as well. There’s been some positive signs in the industry the past six months; they’ve posted upswings in percentages, as far as what is being sold amounts-wise, across the board in CD format and vinyl format. This is an encouraging sign, and we want to get music out to those people who still want to buy it in that physical format.

At the old location, the selection seemed focused on jazz and instrumental rock. Is that still the focus?

You know, some of those areas you mentioned are personal favorites of [mine], but we’ve also, from the beginning, carried a broad, deep catalog of classic rock, Americana, and country and folk, and things like that. It might seem maybe like it was focused on just those things [laughs], but not necessarily, those just happen to be areas of my own personal interest.

I thought it was strange that the old store didn’t have a hip-hop section.

We don’t have a hip-hop section still, but you can find hip-hop titles mixed in with the soul and R&B stuff. Some of the bigger names like Gnarls Barkley and Raphael Saadiq—some of the more cross-over-y sorts of things, we carry. Eminem and things like that we’ve carried, and we sell a little of it, but it’s not really a huge focus for us, especially since a lot of that sort of stuff is very singles oriented for a lot of people, so a lot of those guys are downloading. But again we’re happy to special order any of that stuff that somebody might want.

What’s the appeal of a brick-and-mortar record store, and what’s unique about selling music in physical formats in a physical space?

There’s a lot of answers for that. People, A, like to browse—the kind of person that likes to buy a physical product as opposed to downloading. I think the kind of person who still buys vinyl or a CD has maybe a different level of commitment as a consumer of music to say, “Yes I’m buying this in this format because I intend to listen to this from beginning to end and get in a little deeper with this music,” as opposed to just a sort of a fast-food attitude toward music. There’s also an aspect of this relating to dialogue, of … talking about stuff. “Have you heard this?” or “What do you like?” You can do that online, at a number of—you can tweet that stuff, you can Facebook it. But there is something to be said about actually talking to a flesh-and-blood human about your likes and dislikes.