Tower Falls

"At first, technology was the great friend of record retailers such as Tower, with the introduction of the compact disc. Not only were shoppers buying new music in the new format, they were replacing warped and scratched LPs and left-baking-in-the-sun cassette tapes with CDs. Once retailers figured out to reconfigure the sales racks and bins to accommodate the new format--remember the cardboard-wasting long box in the early day of CD retailing?--life was beautiful.
"But then technology turned into a great competitive foe when it brought out the Internet, and a many-headed one at that."

Bill Virgin in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer seeks to explain the collapse of Tower Records.

And in the San Francisco Chronicle, Joel Selvin provides a history of the store.

And, finally, Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times and Paul Farhi in The Washington Post lament Tower's collapse.