Streetlight Records

There’s something about California that’s hard to explain. I’ve only been there twice in my life, and both times I felt a change in the air compared to my home state of New Hampshire. It wasn’t better or worse. It was different. Maybe it was the warm temperatures when back home it was cold. Maybe it was the palm trees I saw the minute I stepped out of the airport’s air-conditioned interior. It’s hard to explain. Much like it is hard to explain why I love vinyl records over other formats. With my eyes closed, I have no doubt I could be fooled in certain conditions, but hand me a record any day. I want to hold it.

Holding a record, flipping through a stack to find the one you’re looking for, is the magic of a record store. It beats scrolling through lines of text with your finger on a touchscreen.   

“I think that the allure of physical goods is finally hitting home for people. You can’t hold a download or a streaming song in your hands. With a download, you can’t read the liner notes, see who plays on the record and find out who the artist’s influences are.”

Right? She put it perfectly. If you’re wondering who she is, she’s the one and only Paige Brodsky, Store Manager (San Jose) and Marketing Coordinator (San Jose/Santa Cruz) for Streetlight Records. 

Streetlight Records has had a long journey over the past forty-plus years. The owner, Robert Fallon, opened his first store in San Francisco in 1975. It started life as a stereo component store. By 1980, it sold records alongside the equipment to play them on. By the mid-80s, Streetlight had expanded to three locations, two in San Francisco and one in San Jose. By the end of the 80s, Paige had found her home. “I joined the streetlight team in 1989 in San Francisco and eventually made my way south. In 1997, we opened our store in Santa Cruz. The two stores in SF have since closed, but the two that remain are still going strong!”

It’s an exciting time for vinyl. It’s also an exciting time for Streetlight Records. Walk through its doors, and you’ll find music lovers, both young and old, looking at album covers, flipping them over to read the track lists, and walking up to the register with their latest finds. With every purchase, there’s a story. With every customer, a tale to tell.

As Paige explains, “There was a customer who had been looking for a particular song for quite a while and was having trouble finding it.” Always ready to help and full of enthusiasm, Paige found the song the customer was looking for. “She was so excited that she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek!”

Moments like that stick with you. “We always try to keep in the forefront of our minds that our job is to connect people with the music they love and that each of us knows how very important that can be in a person’s life.”

It’s what keeps customers coming back. Walking into Streetlight is a musical journey. You never know what you’ll find or walk out with. 

“Sometimes I look out in the vinyl section, and every person out there is under the age of 20,” Paige says. “It thrills me to see the next generation embracing vinyl, much like I did when I was that age.”

With renewed interest comes demand. As exciting as it is, that demand has put pressure on an industry that wasn’t quite prepared for the sudden growth of vinyl. Used records will always be there; it’s the production of new records and the reissues that are experiencing a struggle to keep up.

“The bottom line is that there just aren’t enough pressing plants to meet demand,” Paige says. “There are other issues, too, but it’s going to take another couple years for enough pressing plants to come online to address the root problem. We stand poised and ready for that moment!”

And I, for one, am thankful for that. Recently, Jack White of The White Stripes stood up to speak directly to the major labels with a plea for them to build their own plants again.

It all goes back to the format. At the end of the day, it’s “the warm, lovely sound of vinyl. It’s not a processed signal of 1’s and 0’s, but the true analog sound—cracks, pops and all.”

Well said, Paige. And thank you!