Karl Groeger
Looney Tunes Record Store
Tell us what it was like growing up around your family’s business: Looney Tunes Record Store.
My dad opened up Looney Tunes in 1971. As far as I can remember, my entire life, all I want to do was hang out at my dad’s record store. I started going to work with my dad at about 6 years old. I remember him telling me once in elementary school, “Hey, you’re not going to school today because Led Zeppelin has a new album out. We need some extra help.” That’s all I ever wanted to do – work at my dad’s record store. So my whole life I worked with my dad at his store, and he also had a wholesale operation. I worked at the warehouse over the summer. I bought the record store from my dad and now my brother Jamie and I run it together. It’s been a family-owned business for 54 years and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And I was fortunate enough that I got to do something I love.
Looney Tunes has been built on three things, my dad always said just take care of these three things and everything else will take care of itself. The first is low discount prices. We try to offer a product at a good discounted price. The best we can. We don’t gouge our prices even if something’s rare or limited, we’re not going to mark it up high. Second, we try to offer a wide selection. Not only do we carry Frank Sinatra, we have Lady Gaga, and the Wicked soundtrack. The third is customer service. We try to take care of our customers as best as we possibly can by not only being nice to them when they come in, trying to help them find stuff, but also to cater to their experience walking in the door. If you’re going to leave your house, which you don’t have to do anymore, you could just order stuff online. If you’re going to spend the time coming into a record store, we want to have an experience at that record store. So we put a stage in the middle of the store where we do a lot of concerts and autograph signings by bands.
Why is it important to shop at local, independently owned record stores?
There are a lot of different ways that Looney Tunes helps artists. We work very closely with all the major record labels and new bands coming up and developing. We’ve done a lot over the years helping new artists get their start. Locally we work with our community in a lot of different ways. We’re involved in a lot of different charities and we have a local section in our store. We have a lot of bands on consignment, and they can bring their music in and we try to promote local bands as much as we possibly can. When there’s a new Lady Gaga record, you can find that music anywhere. Our job, as a record store, is to promote bands you’ve never heard of before. So we do a lot with local bands trying to help them get shows, advertise for when they’re playing around and try to support their physical products.
So we try to cater towards those local bands as much as we can and as far as the money is concerned when you support a local mom-and-pop business in your community, not only are you helping that store owner, but you’re also helping the staff that live in the area. That store stays alive and then they have to go get lunch and, support another local store that’s around the area. There are a lot of figures that show that the money that you spend in local businesses particularly stays within that community and helps build that community.
Can you please share some bands or musicians you’ve supported since the beginning of their careers?
Have you heard of Billy Joel? It’s amazing to help bands like Billy Joel or Joan Jett or Twisted Sister. They were all up and coming. There’s a band called Taking Back Sunday that we supported from the get-go. In the beginning, we had their records on consignment and then all of a sudden now they’re a huge college touring band.
Our hope for those new bands is that if they have the artistic ability and talent to make music, they can continue to be an artist and support themselves that way for the rest of their lives. That’s what our dream is – to try to help those artists stay artists.
Please explain why music sounds “better” in vinyl versus digital forms.
So back in 1971, when my dad first opened up the record store and here we are, 54 years later, the evolution of enjoying music as an art form in its medium has changed significantly, to say the least. Back in 1971, our store used to be all vinyl, and then it was 8mm reel to reel, and then it was 8 tracks and then it was cassette tapes and then it was CDs and now vinyl is popular again.
People always say, “Oh, it sounds much better on vinyl,” and it does. But you have to have certain conditions. You have to have a good record player, a good receiver and a good set of speakers.
Spotify or digital music takes those large files and shrinks them to fit a digital format. And they cut off the high ends of the music and they cut off some of the low ends of the music. And you’re left with a smaller file that’ll fit on a CD or streaming service.
When you go back to vinyl, you can take that original large format file and put that on vinyl and listen to a better quality version. When you drop a needle on that record player, and if you have a good system, the sound that you can get from it is just the closest thing to seeing a band live.
What is something unexpected about the record store business today?
CD format is still doing phenomenally. People think CDs are going away. They’re not going away. The record industry has been telling me that CDs are going away since 1998. We’re still here 54 years later. We’re still selling CDs and our CD sales from 2023 to 2024 were up. We sold more CDs than ever last year and they’re continuing to do well. And the vinyl format has gone from 100% of our business in the 70s to 0% of our business, now back to about 50% of our business.
Artists come to your store for performances and signings. Please share a special story of an artist’s visit.
We’ve done over 500 events at the store, which is unbelievable. We did an event with Ozzy Osbourne. We had 3000 people at the store and everybody got to meet him. He couldn’t sign autographs for 3000 people in the time we had him, so we built a big stage and backdrop. We built a throne like a Game of Thrones medieval throne. He sat on this big throne, and we had Polaroid cameras at the time so everyone got their own Polaroid picture with him. It was kind of like meeting Santa Claus at the mall, except it was meeting Ozzy Osbourne at Looney Tunes.
Another fun event comes to mind. There was a band called Staind back in the day. They had that hit song, “It’s Been a While.” They were supposed to do an event here and it got canceled the night before and we were really upset. They were going to do a midnight signing for us for 1,000 people but then they got offered to play MTV Unplugged the same day. The president of the record label called me and said how they had to cancel and when I said how they were screwing us a little bit he asked how they could make it up to us.
I came up with the most crazy plan that I could ever imagine. We decided to have the band come back and play live, but to play on top of our roof. My favorite band is The Beatles. For me, music is The Beatles, and then everybody else. I always thought it was cool how The Beatles did their last concert, Let It Be, on top of the roof. So I thought let’s have Staind play on top of our roof. We started to coordinate and make that happen and it was an unbelievable task to try to make it happen and we did.
We had 7,500 people show up and as far as you could see, for a quarter mile it was just a sea of people in front of our store and they played on top of our store. And it’s a pretty famous event. It was the largest in-store event in Electra Records history. It still is. They took pictures of it and it was on the front cover of Billboard magazine the following week. The band was the number one band in the country. They had the number-one album in the country. They had the number-one song on the radio and they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was a pretty cool event.
Music is such a unique, personal preference. How do you foster an environment that’s welcoming to everyone?
That’s a great question. The first rule of any business is Economics 101, fulfilling the needs of the consumer. I can’t fill the store with just Beatles records. I can’t just fill what I want in the store. We have a great staff and a young staff and we try to figure out how we can fill up the store with stuff that the people walking in the doors want. What are the new bands coming out? What are the new things or what are the new trends? We’re always trying to gauge those things by staying active on social media, trying to figure out what’s happening, what’s cool, what’s happening on any given day.
Every Friday is New Release Day. Every given Friday we have between 40 to 70 new releases every single week. We might just have one piece of something or we might have 10 of something, but every single week there are on average about 40 different releases every single week. We’re constantly bringing in new material to the store to keep it fresh.
And we’re known for special orders. We deal with every record company. And we have such great relationships. We order from this one company and they’re the biggest physical media company in the world, called Alliance. We can order stuff up until 6:00 pm the day and have it in our store by 8:00 am the next morning.
What is an underrated album that you recommend people listen to?
There’s a new album coming out by Pink Floyd. It’s a very popular old-school band and they are reissuing an album called Live at Pompeii that hasn’t been available for decades. It’s kind of like an under-the-radar type of release. Not a lot of people know about this particular concert or show, but it’s one of their best concerts and shows that they’ve ever done. It’s finally coming back out after like 30 years.
Besides records and CDs – what else can people find at your store?
Not only do we have a large selection of records and CDs, we also have an enormous rock’n’roll concert T-shirt selection. We have over 300 concert T-shirts. We have over 500 posters like posters and stuff like that for your walls. We have body jewelry, stickers, hats, patches, posters, vinyl turntables, CD players. There’s just a ton of stuff. Vinyl accessories, incense candles, gifts. The incense department continues to do fantastic. We have a ton of really cool backflow incense burners, gifts and candles. You can come in and find a bunch of stuff for anybody.
What’s your favorite thing about owning a record store?
My favorite thing about owning a record store is interacting with our customers. Our first customer of the day today was a 12-year-old girl. Her dad bought her her first record player here on Saturday for her birthday and she came in today to get her first record. I was thinking, maybe she wants the new Noah Kahan or the new Chappell Roan. I ask her what she’s looking for and she says, “Do you have any Miles Davis?” My mind was blown. Here’s this, 12-year-old girl, young lady, and she’s looking for Miles Davis and I sold her Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. And that’s going to be her first record that she’s listening to. Just that interaction and just being surprised that she was into Miles Davis. She bought all these cool records that you wouldn’t think a 12-year-old would be into and that interaction just made my day. That’s exactly why I get up in the morning.
Tell us about Record Store Day.
Back in the day, you had all these independently owned record stores and then you have the big box stores. 30 years ago we started to notice that the record labels and the companies started to cater to the big guys. There was a big album coming out and the versions given to big box stores were going to have an extra song on it. It blew our mind. We were so upset. We’ve been supporting this band for years and the release was going to be huge for us. Now nobody’s going to want our piece because if you go over to a big box store, you get an extra song on it. We were so mad that it led to a couple of things. There were a couple of independent record stores that formed a coalition. Our coalition was called CIMS, the coalition of independent music stores. And there were two other coalitions. So the three major coalitions at the time got together band together and we started an organization. The coalitions got together and did some marketing and advertising and helped each other. When we found out the record companies were doing these things we banded together and said “Hey, if you’re going to do that for the big guys, why not give us something special too? Something you’re not going to give that big box store. What can you do for us?”
And we said to the record companies, why don’t you give us, the independent stores, a vinyl record version of this release? And the record labels are like, really? You want a record? Even though nobody buys records anymore? We said yeah, trust us, we want a record. And we’re going to have a special day and we’re going to call it Record Store Day and we want you to give us some select cool records for just our coalition of independent stores. We opened it up to all independently owned record stores.
You have to be an independently owned record store to participate in Record Store Day and you have to sign a pledge to say you’re going to follow certain rules to be in this group. The record labels said, “All right, we’ll give you a couple of records.” I believe the first Record Store Day, 20 years ago, I think there were 11 or 15 pieces that were given to independent record stores. And not only did they sell, it was unbelievable. They sold like wildfire, and everybody sold out of everything and it was amazing.
As Record Store Day continued to grow year after year, the record industry got so popular again because of this one day. Now they put everything out on vinyl, but that organization, Record Store Day is the reason why the vinyl format is so popular in the world to this day. And it started because of independent stores like Looney Tunes. Record Store Day is now our best day of the year. Decades later it’s our busiest day of the year. This year we have 435 exclusive pieces coming out that day. We have people lining up at our store the night before. It’s such a chaotic special day when you have a couple thousand people coming to your store. You have to organize and make sure it’s good. It’s wonderful to see. It’s the most important day of the year and it’s truly a great celebration of music as an art form. This year’s Record Store Day is on April 12.
March, 2025
