Can Lexington’s most visible, longest running independent music store survive COVID?

When retail avenues for distributing recorded music in Central Kentucky shut down after the COVID-19 outbreak hit this spring, one Lexington business kept the rock ‘n’ roll rolling.

For CD Central, the city’s most visible and longest running independent record store, the sounds never fully stopped. But its game plan for selling new and used vinyl albums and compact discs, already a commercial challenge in a heavily digital age, was redrawn. The South Limestone store near the University of Kentucky campus went the way of restaurants and augmented its mail order business with curbside service. That meant patrons could pick up music purchased over the phone from an employee without leaving their car.

You could pick up dinner curbside once the pandemic hit. Why not a copy of the new Pearl Jam album?

But the challenges facing record stores went further than that. While curbside and mail order business meant store sales never fully evaporated, they also underscored one of the main appeals of record buying lost, for a time, to COVID conditions.

“Obviously, we were closed as far as people being able to come into the store,” said CD Central owner Steve Baron. “That meant, for a little over two months, no one could come in and browse. That’s a big deal because this is a very browsing kind of business. That’s why record stores really exist, so you can browse through the stacks like you would at a bookstore. So not having people come into the store was a major problem.

“We were able to do little bits of sales. It was a fraction of what we were doing during normal times when people could come in the store. By a fraction, we’re talking maybe a quarter of the sales we had before. But, still, we were able to maintain some kind of presence that way.”

Adding to the coronavirus-provoked business was another obstacle. With so much of the music industry out of action, newly recorded music was at a premium. And new music, Baron insists, is what gets people to record stores to browse in the first place.

“Every week – specifically, every Friday - there are a whole slate of new releases – usually hundreds of them, of which we basically decide which ones we feel our local customers will want,” Baron said. “That really dried up in the last couple of months because artists and labels were saying, ‘Well, we really don’t want to put out our biggest releases at a time when stores are closed, people don’t want to go out and artists can’t tour.’ So a lot of high profile releases that would have come out in March, April, May or June were postponed or canceled entirely.”

Enter a perhaps unlikely hero, the immensely popular Alabama songsmith Jason Isbell. His seventh studio album, “Reunions,” was one of the spring’s most anticipated releases. But rather than postpone the record’s May 15 release date, Isbell allowed independent record stores like CD Central to sell it one week early.

“He has such a great fanbase,” Baron said. “He’s also been very supportive of record stores over the years (Isbell played an in-store concert at CD Central as a relative unknown in 2007). So that helped a lot just having that one high profile release. Bumping the release date up a week so independents like us were able to sell it exclusively was a great gesture on his part, too.”

CD Central reopened for in-store customer business, with mask wearing and social distancing requirements in place, on May 26. While Baron said business has largely returned to a pre-lockdown level, there has been two casualties from having its doors closed to the public over much of the spring.

The first was the store’s 25th anniversary, which it planned to celebrate on March 28 with an accompanying evening party at Rock House Brewing that was canceled. The other was Record Store Day, an international promotion, now in its 13 year, where artists issue hundreds of limited-edition recordings as a promotion for the retail profile of indie stores. It was originally slated for April 18 and then June 20. It has since been split into three less prominent promotions on Aug. 29, Sept. 26 and Oct. 24.

“That was a bummer,” Baron said. “We wound up being closed on our actual 25th anniversary. We made some merchandise to give away and all that kind of stuff. That had to pretty much go out the window. We haven’t rescheduled. I’m not sure if we’re going to do something in the fall. I would like to. And then, of course, there was Record Store Day. That’s our biggest day of the year. Any record store will tell you that. It’s really become such a huge thing not only from a monetary standpoint, but also from a promotion, publicity and good will kind of standpoint. This is our day to shine and make a party out of it. But every organization, every group is having to cancel things.”

Of course, the big challenge awaiting CD Central in the future is the same one facing all aspects of the music business, and pretty much all retail businesses, period – uncertainty.

“There is so much disappointment amongst everybody that we can’t go out and experience live music,” Baron said. “Our local music venues are endangered and struggling. We always carry a lot of local music, so we’re not seeing new things coming into the stores as far as local releases are concerned. Everything is in this holding pattern. We share in that disappointment with everybody about the uncertainty over what’s going to happen.

“For us, though, a lot of people have gone out of their way to say how glad they are we’re open again to where they can actually come in the store and browse. We had a lot of phone calls in the weeks leading up to the re-opening asking when we were going to open. They’ve been happy to get out of the house and shop for music, so the response has been great.

“We’re doing precautions, of course. We’re asking people to wear masks and sanitize and all that, which nobody really likes to do. But our customers have been good natured about it because they realize that’s what it’s going to take to be able get out and shop.”

CD Central

Address: 377 S Limestone

Hours: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon.-Sat., noon-6 p.m. Sun.

Online: cdcentralmusic.com

Call: 859-233-3472