Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art.

This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

Gina Arnold is an author, music journalist, and adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, USA. She has been a writer for Rolling Stone, Spin, the Village Voice and many other publications, and is author of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville (Bloomsbury, 2014), Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella (2018), and co-editor of Music/Video (Bloomsbury, 2017).

John Dougan is Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, Spin, All Music Guide, American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, Salon, and Perfect Sound Forever. He is the author of The Who Sell Out (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Mistakes of Yesterday, The Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

Christine Feldman-Barrett is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. A youth cultural historian, she is author of "We are the Mods": A Transnational History of a Youth Subculture (2009) and A Women's History of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is also editor of Lost Histories of Youth Culture (2015).

Matthew Worley is Professor of modern history at the University of Reading, UK. His more recent work has concentrated on the relationship between youth culture and politics in Britain, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. He is the author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-1984 (2017) and co-founder of the Subcultures Network.