June Records is closing in August. The College Street building has been sold by its landlord with the new owners wanting to put in their own retail space, according to the indie store’s owner. And so the seven-year-old shop is gearing up to move out.
It’s the second independent record store in Toronto to close this month, following Invisible City Editions.
For June, the announcement comes just two months after opening June Space, a live music venue at the back of the store – a response to the city’s dearth of DIY venues.
“There aren’t enough DIY spaces in the city, so we built one and people love it,” says owner Ian Cheung over the phone. “The irony is that the fast-moving capitalism, the classist recession happening in the city is why people need spaces like this, but [those forces] can happen to us too. And they did.”
The store will spend the new couple of months liquidating its stock of records and will soon announce sales. June Space had already planned a private customer appreciation party this Friday, which will now double as an early goodbye party.
Cheung says it’s possible they may open in a new location or in a new form, but says he hasn’t spent much time looking yet. Cheung, who lives in an apartment above the store, will also have to move at the end of August.
“Because of the nature of what we do, we can’t really afford Toronto rent right now,” he says. “The places with desirable rent prices are not desirable spots and vice versa.”
He says he’s noticed people’s record buying habits changing, and says that he’d rather have a spot with less retail space and less reliance on foot traffic, but with space to also re-open the venue. (“Having a DIY event space is actually more appealing to me right now than having a record store,” he says.) He’s also open to a space shared with other artists, or a pop-up presence to keep the brand alive with occasional record sales.
With the housing crisis, Cheung says people seem to prefer experiences over physical belongings. “And people are more selective in the records they buy. They just buy records that are collectible or strongly associated with their identity or sense of nostalgia.”
June Records is more taste-driven than stats or market-driven, but, he says, “most people just want the same 20 records, and you can only sell those to them once.”
He’s not bitter, though. Cheung says overall the industry has been good to him, and that the last seven years have been the best of his life. He highlights the amazing shows experimental music promoter Tad Michalak threw there in the store’s early days, the artists he’s met who’ve come to shop there, their annual presence at the Taste of Little Italy festival, the album release performance Zeus threw that crowded the laneway next to the store with 2,000 people.
“There have been couples that met in the store and got married, people working here who’ve become rock stars in front of our eyes – like Steve Sladkowski from PUP and Jay Anderson, who’s played in half the bands in the city,” he says. “People have shot films here, literary rags have had their launches here, celebrities have shopped here – Billy Corgan bought 20 or 30 prog records, just pilfered the whole section.
“The thing I’ll miss the most though is just showing people cool shit and having their minds blown,” he continues. “Having them come back and saying they wore this record out that they never would have discovered otherwise. It’s a tiny little thing, but that’s what sticks with me.”
If the store comes back, he says, he wants June to be even more specialized in a way he recognized might be even harder to sustain. “Just totally purist, way more specialized,” he says. “No classic rock.”
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