When everyone is streaming music, how can a record store survive?

The green room is where musicians ranging from headliners to local pickers have tuned their banjos, fiddles, mandolins, guitars and basses before taking the stage at the Floyd Country Store. 

On a recent weekday, store co-owner Dylan Locke sat in the green room talking about changes in the music business. While audiences will still pay to hear their favorite acts live, it’s a different story when it comes to the recordings that songwriters, musicians and engineers work so hard to create.

“Nobody buys music anymore,” said Locke, who’s a musician himself as well as a businessman. “This is a world where consumers get their music for free. We live in a world where a plumber gets paid, a mechanic gets paid, but a musician and a songwriter does not.”

Locke was exaggerating, but the statistics paint a discouraging picture for recording artists who are not Taylor Swift. 

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, CD sales peaked in 2000 and have since been decimated by the rise of filesharing, downloads and streaming. A recent uptick in vinyl LPs offers a ray of hope, but sales remain dominated by streaming. 

For many recording artists, payments from streaming don’t come close to replacing income from lost physical sales. Spotify pays musicians around $0.004 per playback — four-tenths of a penny — meaning it would take 3,750 streams to earn $15, the typical price of one CD.

With turntables and disc players replaced by smartphones, and LPs and CDs replaced by digitized files, many record and CD stores have closed. In 2018, this could have been the fate of County Sales, a bluegrass and old-time record store and mail-order outlet in the town of Floyd.

The business was technically still profitable, but sales were declining, according to Mark Freeman, son of store founder Dave Freeman.

In a Zoom interview from his Charlottesville home, Mark Freeman recounted how his dad started County Sales. (Dave Freeman, 84 and in poor health, no longer gives interviews.)

In the early 1960s, many young, white Northeastern urbanites were discovering the roots music of the 1920s and ’30s — blues, hillbilly and folk.

“My dad wasn’t into the folk scene, even though he was up in New York,” Mark Freeman said. “My dad was probably four or five years older than … the Dylan crowd that was getting into folk in the ’60s.”

On car trips from New York to Florida on U.S. 1, the Freemans listened to AM radio. When they reached the South, the accents changed and gospel and hillbilly music hit their Northern ears. 

Dave’s parents didn’t like it. “They were into Frank Sinatra and big band stuff … but they saw my dad loved it, they kept the radio on and it just went from there.”

In New York City in 1965, the young enthusiast started a record label. “On the radio stations, he noticed how different the music was county to county, which is why it’s called County Records,” Dylan Locke said. “There’s music that’s regionally specific. Even from Franklin County to Floyd, people play the fiddle tunes slightly different.”

Freeman issued two series on early County Records. The 500 series consisted of reissues of pre-war recordings by artists such as North Carolina banjo player Charlie Poole (1892-1931) and the Skillet Lickers, a group from Georgia that recorded for Columbia in the 1920s. “He would take those 78s and basically lift and transfer them into a 12-song vinyl collection,” Mark Freeman said. 

The 700 series featured contemporary artists like fiddler Kenny Baker. Some tracks were recorded in Nashville studios, others during festival performances or in motel rooms, Freeman said.

County Sales began as County Records’ mail-order distribution arm. In those pre-internet days the catalog was printed on paper. The original customers were mostly Freeman’s friends and fellow enthusiasts in the North.

In 1973, Dave Freeman moved to Floyd “because that’s where the epicenter of the music was,” Mark Freeman said. “He couldn’t continue doing it up in New York.” Floyd’s then-low cost of living was another attraction. Mark was born in Manhattan in January 1974, and he and his mother joined Dave in Floyd later that year.  

County Sales became a source of old-time and bluegrass recordings with customers worldwide. Hidden away in Talley’s Alley in Floyd, it primarily served mail-order buyers, although walk-in browsers were also welcome.

Toshio Watanabe of Takarazuka, Japan, is a bluegrass musician who orders records for himself and for his business, B.O.M. Services, a kind of County Sales of Japan. Watanabe, 76, has been a County Sales customer since its early days. “They do [a] great job,” he wrote in an email. “And it’s great to celebrate 50 years of contributing to the development of Bluegrass and Old-Time Music.”

In 1979 Dave Freeman bought Rebel Records. County Records is now part of Charlottesville-based Rebel.

By the 2010s, Dave Freeman was in his 70s and “was just tired of keeping up” with County Sales, Mark said. Dave put out feelers to potential buyers. Dylan Locke of the Country Store, a well-known music venue, was a natural fit. 

“Dad hadn’t worked with Dylan that much but he could tell that Dylan was a responsible guy and his heart was in the right place,” Mark said. Locke bought the business in 2018.

“Dylan has preserved County Sales and he’s moved [it] into the 21st century — all that we could ask for,” Mark Freeman said. 

In 2019 Locke moved County Sales to a more visible location at 117 S. Locust St., near the Country Store, and made it part of the Handmade Music School, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, of which he is the executive director. 

“Here are our two options,” Locke said. “Slowly fade away as a bricks-and-mortar record store,  because they’re just not a thing anymore. Or we can shift our focus.”

The concept of a nonprofit record business isn’t new, Locke said, pointing to Smithsonian Folkways and the Field Recorders’ Collective. 

In keeping with Handmade Music School’s educational goal, the store will morph into a hybrid museum/retail outlet, perhaps with the assistance of grants. Many people who come to Floyd might not want to buy a record, but might visit a country music museum, Locke said. 

There’s already a display case with early country memorabilia, including a Victor 78 recorded at the 1927 Bristol Sessions by Dad Blackard’s Moonshiners, also known as the Shelor Family of Patrick County (see this Cardinal story on the Shelor Family).

But County Sales is looking forward as well. The store will offer the first new County Records product in years, “Kenny Baker Country,” slated for Christmas release.

“Kenny Baker will come out on vinyl, as well as digital downloads,” Locke said. “We’ll play the game just like everyone does — it’ll be on streaming services. But if you’re a collector, you’ll want the vinyl. It’s got liner notes. You have something that’s beautiful and tangible, and you can hold it in your hands.”

There are plenty of things you can hold in your hands at County Sales. 

The store focuses on “albums in their entirety as artists intended, books, older records, whether it’s new old stock or used,” said manager Corbin Hayslett. The shelves hold around 10,000 titles, about 50/50 CDs and vinyl. 

“There is a definite resurgence and heightened interest in LPs. And a lot of new artists are putting out LPs of new albums,”  Hayslett said. But many people of all ages still buy CDs, especially musicians or music scholars. 

Hayslett declined to disclose dollar sales but said the store ships around 5,000 orders a year. An order might consist of anywhere from one to 20 CDs or LPs. 

New old stock consists of “records that were pressed decades ago and were properly stored, just never opened or played. Over the past year and a half, we’ve bought records a couple of times from a gentleman outside of Nashville, Tenn.” In the ’80s and ’90s, “he and his father-in-law … bought up every sealed bluegrass LP they came across.” That’s how County acquired a dozen new old stock copies of “For The Good People” by the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys.

There’s also old old stock. “I don’t put as many 78s out on the floor just because they’re so fragile and a lot of people don’t necessarily know how to handle them, but we do sell 78s from … the ’20s and ’30s.”

To be clear, the music itself is in zero danger of dying out. Live performances attract good crowds, new recordings still come out and young people still take up the traditional instruments.

Jesse Smathers’ grandfather and great-uncle played in a Western Carolina string band. Now Smathers, 31, makes a living working at County Sales, playing guitar in the Lonesome River Band, and teaching at Handmade Music School. “I’m just thankful for the opportunity to … make music my life and pass along the traditions,” he said.

Said Locke: “With Handmade Music School I never have used the word preserve, because I felt like the culture around the Handmade Music School, Floyd Country Store, County Sales, Floyd, Virginia in general, is very much alive. We’re not reviving — there’s no preservation. This is celebration. And Handmade Music School is just sort of put into place to keep that oxygen getting pumped into that room.”