The last record store in town: Boulder CD shop has outlasted the competition, but just barely.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: COTE'S [colorado] - Viewpoint essay

Andy Schneidkraut's MySpace page lists him as "100 years old." The owner of Albums on the Hill is only a little more than halfway there, but it takes a lot out of you to run a record store in the digital age.

With the closure of Bart's CD Cellar near the Pearl Street Mall in February, Albums on the Hill has the distinction of being the only retail store in Boulder dedicated to selling compact discs. That the small basement shop he has owned for 22 years is the last one standing brings Schneidkraut little solace.

"Right now I have a patient landlord who thinks I'm going to figure it out," Schneidkraut said one January afternoon at his store on the "Hill" near the University of Colorado campus. "And he may have more confidence in me than I have in myself."

You can hardly blame Schneidkraut for sounding like the fight has been knocked out of him. The service his store offers--the expertise of an owner who has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and a passion for turning people on to new artists--is not much of an arsenal against the popularity of digital downloads, legal or not. CD sales, already down 45 percent from 2000 to 2008, dropped 19 percent in 2009, according to Nielsen SoundScan (as cited by Denver writer Steve Knopper in Rolling Stone.)

The last major retail chain, Virgin Megastore, closed its doors in Denver and everywhere else last year, joining the ranks of Sam Goody, Where-house Music and Tower Records. Once, those stores were the enemies of independent shops like Schneidkraut's. But their presence also represented the strength of the music industry. Even Bart's CD Cellar, a longtime independent Boulder icon, was owned by a small chain for its final four years.

"I don't think it's in any way good news to see Bart's close. I think it's bad news," Schneidkraut said as the folk-tinged sound of Iron and Wine provided a soundtrack. "My best years were when there were 15 or 16 stores in town. Boulder at one time had the honor of being the community that had more square footage in retail dedicated to selling music than any town of comparable size in the country. And it was a heyday."

That heyday is long gone. Albums on the Hill hardly resembles a mighty victor in the music war. One CD listening station has an "out of order" sign on it, the...