The Latest
October 2015
Hiya Everyone….., well it’s been 10 years since the following article was written about my shop & me.
Anyone who collects vinyl knows it’s like “Ritz Crackers” you cant just stop…..So in the 8 years between
shops I amassed 10K MORE….! Two years ago I retired and decided to reopen the shop at this location.
I hope you can stop by & check it out for yourself, also keep up with the website for upcoming sales and
events.
Joe Ponticelle
joe@daddyosrecordrack.com
VINYL REVIVAL
Record store owner serves up platters from yesteryear
by CHRISTOPHER O’DONNELL
Published: Thursday, September 29, 2005 at 3:49 a.m.
Copyright © 2005 HeraldTribune.com — All rights reserved.
Entrepreneur hopes to corner the market on vinyl
NOKOMIS — In an age when the Internet gives instant access to millions of songs, and electronics stores offer huge caches of compact discs, is anyone really interested in buying vinyl records? Joe Ponticelle is betting they are. In a small storefront off Laurel Road( now located in Osprey on highway 41), he has set up a shop filled with 60,000 vinyl records. For people who grew up with 33s and 45s, CDs and MP3s are no substitute, he said. “I love to hook people up with their memories,” Ponticelle said. “When you hold that record, it’s romantic. There’s a story being told.”
Ponticelle’s store, DaddyO’s Record Rack, will open Saturday. The name came from the nickname Ponticelle’s children use for their father whose dialogue is sprinkled with words like “cool” and “hep.” Ponticelle admits that he has no idea whether the venture will be successful, but he hopes that with few alternatives — his store is the only vinyl outlet in southern Sarasota County — vinyl enthusiasts will be drawn there. “I might sell three records in a month and go belly-up,” he said. “I just had to get it out of my system.”
A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Ponticelle worked as an assistant animator for studios such as Hanna-Barbera in the early 1970s before finding work in Hollywood as an assistant cameraman. The 58-year-old, who has lived in Nokomis for the past two years, worked on movies such as “Van Helsing” and “What Lies Beneath.” The price for carrying heavy movie cameras for hours on end was three shoulder operations.
Getting the store ready to open has been a mammoth task. Ponticelle hired two 20-foot trucks to drive more than 100,000 records across country from his former home in California. He made the record bins in his store out of fiberboard. Ponticelle built up the huge collection of records mostly from estate and garage sales in Los Angeles. “Everyone was getting rid of them because they were heavy and their wives were throwing them out,” he said. Most albums in the store will sell for around $3, although rare albums will be more expensive.
Once the dominant music format, vinyl sales declined rapidly in the mid-1980s following the launch of CDs. With the advent of legal downloading services such as Napster and Apple’s iTunes Music Store, sales of CDs have declined by 15 percent since 2000.
But with each advance, the customer has become further removed from the music, Ponticelle said. A teenager downloading songs or purchasing a CD doesn’t connect with the music as deeply as one who worked a paper route and spent every penny he earned on records.
“He’s got 12-by-12 tangibility in his hands; he’s got liner notes; he’s like a part of the group,” Ponticelle said. “How many kids today even read the liner notes?”
While he does stock some CDs, with almost all of his store devoted to vinyl, it is easy to see where Ponticelle’s loyalties lie. Inside, album sleeves from classic jazz and easy listening recordings from Miles Davis, Count Basie and Dean Martin cover one wall, facing the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Clash. Against the walls and in the center of the store, 6-foot bins hold thousands of albums that customers can lose themselves in while flipping through. “This is the hobby that took over my life,” Ponticelle said. “If I make a sheckle or a bob, it’s going back to buy ‘Buddy Rich versus Max Roach: Battle of the Drums.’ ”
Determining the viability of Ponticelle’s store is not easy. Although albums account for less than 1 percent of all music sold, sales have stopped declining in recent years. The survival of the niche is credited to the support of audiophiles, who insist analog recordings have a warmer sound than digital ones. That difference is often just a result of higher treble frequencies, according to Gene Pitts, editor and publisher of The Audiophile Voice magazine.
“When you hear someone saying something like that, they are usually an audiophile, usually past the age of 50, with hundreds of records and have usually invested heavily in equipment to play that format,” Pitts said. The increasing popularity of MP3 players, which compress digital songs often at the expense of quality, is evidence that, for most consumers, convenience trumps quality, Pitts said. “Most people opt for putting more songs on that small format,” Pitts said. “If they don’t care, I can’t force them to.” That choice is also reflected in the limited demand for turntables at local hi-fi stores. Christine Logue, a salesperson at Audio Visions, said the store sells only six to 10 turntables a year, although they service between 25 and 30 from as far as Miami and Jacksonville. Other stores said they do not even stock turntables. The Sarasota Emporium off Main Street in downtown Sarasota also carries music on wax. The store at 230 Shopping Ave. specializes in rock ‘n’ roll, soul, jazz and country music. Owner John Megge says the store even carries some classical music on vinyl. The Emporium has about 1,500 albums on wax in stock.
Ponticelle has used Web sites such as eBay to sell records but said the hassle of scanning album covers and describing the condition of records makes it too time-consuming. “Nothing is going to be on a computer,” he said. “If someone asks for ‘Sketches of Spain’ by Miles Davis, I can point to a bin and say it’s in there.”
Copyright © 2005 HeraldTribune.com — All rights reserved.