I first set foot in downtown Silver Spring’s Record Exchange in the fall of 2022. I’d just moved to Montgomery County to work for MoCo360, and the first thing I did when I moved into my new Silver Spring apartment was set up my turntable and vinyl collection. The second thing I did was to look up the record store nearest to me–which happened to be just a couple blocks away.
As I walked into the Colesville Avenue store, I couldn’t help but notice that vintage records had been repurposed as floor tiles–this was the coolest record store I’d ever been in, I thought. The second thing I noticed was the owners laughing with customers as they helped them purchase records. I knew then this was a special place.
More than a year and a half later, I sat in the back of the store after hours the night of June 7, surrounded by cardboard boxes and dozens of records. It was two days before the Record Exchange was set to close for good, and co-owner Sheila Hunt was still hard at work after 9 p.m., pricing vinyl records to display on the sales floor.
“It’s a mess in here, but we want to get everything out for people to look through this weekend,” Hunt told me, while sorting through records and climbing over boxes on Friday night.
I’d been in the store dozens of times and had enjoyed chatting with Hunt about the Lauryn Hill and Arlo Parks albums she sold me. But I knew this visit would be my last.
Record Exchange, which sold new and used records, CDs, DVDs, turntables and music memorabilia closed Sunday after over 26 years in business.
There’s a line in the movie Almost Famous, recently popularized in viral TikToks, where Kate Hudson’s character Penny Lane says, “if you ever get lonely, just go to the record store and visit your friends.” For me, Record Exchange was that store.
As a single 20-something in a new city where I didn’t know anyone, I felt at home going to the record store. Though I was still trying to find my place in the county, the slightly musky copies of the Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel and Elton John albums felt familiar, and I loved being surrounded by strangers who were as nerdy about music as I was.
Hunt and her co-owner, Brian France, would always make the time to chat about whatever album I bought, and would offer recommendations. When I bought my dad a Jason Isbell album for his birthday in hopes of turning him on to the Americana rocker’s music that I loved, Hunt helped me pick out a good vinyl cleaning kit to go with it. My dad recalled how much he’d spun that record before we went to the Jason Isbell concert in Philadelphia this year.
“You’ve got to take me to that store when I come visit,” he said.
And I wasn’t the only one who feels emotionally attached to Record Exchange, it turns out.
Hunt and France announced in May 27 Instagram video that they planned to close the business on June 9. Hunt told MoCo360 a “perfect storm” of factors led her and France to decide to close, including decreased foot traffic, personal life events, the inflated costs of vinyl and increasing upfront costs.
The post was met with more than 1,000 likes and 200 comments from customers, voicing their disappointment in the news.
“My heart just dropped,” one commenter wrote.
Others noted their disappointment in losing a local brick-and-mortar store they could walk to, and several said they started their record collections by shopping at Record Exchange.
“You built something special that was a pillar of the community,” one commenter wrote. “Another great [analog] business in an ever-more digital/AI world.”
For Hunt and France, the hardest part of closing is saying goodbye to their customers.
“Our customers are family,” Hunt said. “We love the people, we know a lot of them by name, and it’s about the interaction, learning about the other types of music they like, the ability to relate to each other. That is the most fun and the thing we look forward to.”
When I saw the Instagram post announcing the closure, I was devastated. Record Exchange had been more than just a store for me.
But I was also surprised. I would’ve thought the time was ripe for a store like Record Exchange.
The Gen Z population has been getting more into vinyl, as popular artists like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo release dozens of different color variants and exclusive versions of albums to collect on vinyl. DJ Mag reported in April that people ages 18 to 24 are buying physical music more than any other age demographic, and CBS News reported in 2023 that vinyl sales topped CD sales for the first time in 30 years.
However, production costs have way gone up, which has in turn affected small record stores.
“The cost of records has gone up. We used to be able to offer an LP at like $19.99,” Hunt said. “You never see that anymore, and even the used stuff is getting more expensive. It was a hustle. Brian and I both love what we do. It’s just some outside factors that contributed to us being kind of burnt out.”
While I’d been a loyal customer for awhile, I didn’t know the story behind Record Exchange, which opened in 1997 in a different location in downtown Silver Spring before moving to its most recent Colesville Road location. The Silver Spring location was borne from a larger business bearing the Record Exchange name that started in Cleveland.
After serving in management for several years, Hunt and France decided to buy the store from then-owner Sam Lock in 2019 to prevent it from closing. The timing led the co-owners to learn to be creative with sales during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We definitely developed more of a social media following at that point,” Hunt told me. “We would take a video of someone flipping through the records. We wanted to mimic it like if it was a human coming in and shopping. We got to know our customers better and it worked in our favor for the moment.”
Hunt said while the store was able to push through the pandemic, she does believe it contributed to current financial struggles that caught up to the business, leading to the closure.
“I still am proud we were able to keep the store open another five years,” Hunt said. “We had the opportunity to run something that we had been a part of for decades … the other option would’ve been for it to close [in 2019].”
I was curious whether the store’s proximity to The Fillmore meant a steady stream of musicians coming in to shop and say hi, so I asked Hunt. She nonchalantly rattled off Record Exchange’s celebrity shoppers, including rapper Earl Sweatshirt, rapper Joyner Lucas, singer Mike Shinoda, members of punk band The Garden, and Suzi Gardner of the band L7–who has kept in touch with Hunt over text.
“Johnny Marr came in and told me I have a good voice,” Hunt told me of the former member of The Smiths. “The interesting thing for us is how not to spasm, fan out.”
But one particularly memorable encounter Hunt shared with me was when The Edge, the lead guitarist of U2, was inconspicuously shopping in the store until he came up to the counter and offered to sign a record.
“He walks up to me, he goes, ‘my wife said that I should bring this up to you and I should sign it,’” Hunt told me. “I was like, uh… . And he opens it up and he points to himself in the picture and said, ‘that’s me right there. I’m The Edge.’ We ended up selling it to a huge fan on Record Store Day.”
Other memories were more personal, but I could tell they were just as sweet for Hunt.
“Brian had a baby when we were at the other [storefront]. He’s a big White Stripes fan. We all put our money together and we bought his first record for his daughter, which was the White Stripes Lullabies Record Store Day album,” Hunt said.
We chatted about the Record Store Days of previous years–in 2023, I got in a line that wrapped around the block in the early morning hours of the day with hundreds of other local vinyl nerds to pick up limited edition exclusive copies of Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna and Amythyst Kiah’s Pensive Pop. I recalled how Hunt had been excited to see I got what I wanted. She told me that was always the goal–to make sure they would have the specific music customers were looking forward to.
As we talked, I was struggling not to get emotional. I associated this store with a pivotal time in my life and considered it a comforting space for people like me who love music.
But Hunt reassured me that the closing of the store was not the end.
“We love our customers, we love selling records to people who love the music. So do I think it’ll probably come back in some form, hopefully,” she said.