LIFESTYLE INTERVIEW: RAND FOSTER - OWNER, FINGERPRINTS

Creating A Massive New Record Store & More In Long Beach, California

By: Stefan Goldby

February 14, 2011

Flying in the face of the closure of many music retailers over the past decade, a cherished few independent record stores have flourished. One of these is Fingerprints in Long Beach, California, which has maintained an impressive upward trajectory since 1992. It recently moved to an eye-opening new venue in the East Village Arts District that is twice the size of its beloved former home in the Belmont Shores neighborhood. Many in the Los Angeles area and beyond have come to know Fingerprints through its legendary series of in-store performances and EPs from artists including independent icons like Jack Johnson, Rilo Kiley, The Hold Steady, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, and Iron & Wine... But even with a solid history and some boldface guests in place, opening a massive new music store in the current financial climate is a ballsy move and one that made Buzzine head down to Long Beach for an interview with Fingerprints owner Rand Foster.

Stefan Goldby: How did you come to be a record store owner in the first place?

Rand Foster: I am a lifelong music dork and spent all my youth in record stores. As I grew up, I went into the amusement park business, met my wife Kelly, traveled a lot, settled in southern California. My wife got tired of me working two days a month and being home all day, so I took a part-time job in a record store called Moby Disc and quickly became the manager. One of the owners opened his own store and used to call me to help with new release orders and customer purchases over the phone, and he kept saying, “You should have your own store. You should do this.  It’s so easy and you would be great at it,” so I started looking into it. And as I got closer and closer (and it was a very much a by-the-steps process) he told his uncle who owned the company and they basically thought I was going to steal their inventory, and so they fired me which was really the push I needed to actually do this thing I had been going through the steps of. [Laughs] So it worked out. It was very much a blessing in disguise.

SG: Tell us about the beginnings of Fingerprints…

We opened in 1500 square feet in 1992. My son was born three months later. We moved house in that same period, and after we got through all that, things were good.  My wife was able to quit her job and focus a little bit more on helping us and it became enough of a business that it fulfilled my initial dream, which was to not lose so much money that I couldn’t afford to stay open. [Laughs] We went on from there and six years later we doubled our size, my daughter was born, we moved house again…so there’s a pattern that I get it going and then I find a way to overwhelm myself, which is where we find ourselves now…

SG: …and which brings us to the big question: Why would you open an almost  10,000-square-foot space predominantly to sell physical music products in the world of  2011?

RF: The master plan answer is because we feel like there’s still a place in the market for it, because the people we talk to are still interested in the artifact of music collection. Because, selfishly, I still collect music and this is where I buy my music. But also, it’s what we’ve done; it’s what we do. I think, as a culture, a lot of us try to separate ourselves from our work, but when you love what you do, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t allow for separation. I’m a record store guy. It’s in my DNA. When I go to another town, the first thing I do is look for record stores. It’s what I do. So that’s a big part of it. I can’t imagine the city of Long Beach without a great record store and I feel like we are on the verge of creating one. I think we have always been a great neighborhood store, but for the first time I feel I can say we are a great store without the ‘neighborhood’ qualifier...

SG:  This is your latest step in building a record store business at a time when other record stores have been declining. What has made you different?

RF: To be totally honest, I wonder about that question too. I don’t know.

I think the industry has done an amazing job of

convincing people that they don’t want their product, which I don’t understand. There are still so many people—myself included - who consume music in a physical form, whether it be a CD, whether it be vinyl…whatever medium people choose, including digital… To me, it’s just about the music, and the medium is somewhat secondary, although my preference is obviously for the physical goods and that’s why we do this. I think we’ve been very fortunate in that we just have an amazingly loyal customer base.

I guess if I had to attribute it to something, I think it is that we do things that feel right, and we try to let that rule our decision, so oftentimes it’s not the financially expedient decision, or something that makes immediate business sense, but just what seems like the right way to do it. Given that choice, I usually try to err on what feels right to me and what I would want, whether I was the customer or the label or the artist, or whoever else is in that equation—I try to be aware of that other side. I love it when everybody wins.

SG: Beyond the local people who are that loyal Fingerprints customer base, a lot of people around the country are familiar with you because of your in-store artist performances, and of the series of “Live At Fingerprints” EPs that have been released. How much of that flowed naturally from what you just said?

RF: I think all of it probably flowed from that. Part of “It feels right” expands into crazy ideas, whether it was “Let’s start a record label”, or, “Let’s put out a 7-inch” -  which was an incredibly expensive endeavor, but I look at it as still being cheaper than the MBA I passed up [laughs]. I think that making everybody happy and making everybody feel like they win has really helped us create lasting relationships with artists. There’s an amazing number of artists who have had either their first in-store experience with us or their first good in-store experience with us.

Tegan & Sara are a great example. Being from Canada, which isn’t known for having a great indie record store community, their early experiences with in-stores were all at big chain stores: fluorescent lights, they didn’t turn the music down, there was no vibe, stick ‘em at the end of an aisle… So they came in and did an in-store with us and were so blown away, they spent the next year talking about what an amazing thing it was, that all they wanted to do was in-stores… The customers are treated with respect, the artists are treated with respect, and we create an environment where there’s an interaction that happens between them that is really hard to get somewhere else. It’s very natural, and we have very few problems.

When The Swell Season played, Marketa wasn’t feeling great, and we walked the autograph line and were like, “Hey, she’s trying to get through to the end of the line, but you have to make sure that you keep it short and sweet. The guys in front of you are going to keep it short and sweet so you get to say hello to her, and you need to do it for the people behind you as well.”  And people got it and were very respectful of that, and that’s kind of the energy that we try to bring to what we do. 

SG: Long Beach has traditionally had a long history of record stores and being a leading part of the music scene…do you feel that you are continuing that tradition? 

RF: We are very much aware that Long Beach has always been a music town.  Sublime came from Long Beach; Birdland West was in Long Beach; The Orange County and LA punk scene of the ‘80s was very much centered in Long Beach; directly across the street from our new store was the former headquarters of SST Records; and going back even farther, the very building we’re in used to be called Magic Music—it was an on-demand jukebox service that was available in, I believe, the mid to late-‘30s. So music history is a big part of it. The culture of record stores in Long Beach has been great. That was a factor when I settled here, and we’re actually working with the Historical Society of Long Beach to create a line of T-shirts that kind of glorifies that and recreates classic T-shirts for record stores that were here in town. We’re trying to get in touch with everybody who had stores here and work it out so that they feel good about it as well because I don’t want anybody to feel ripped off…I think it will be a cool thing. 

SG: There’s a lot of hooks here for people who are “record store people” and for anybody who has a sense of the history. But how do you go about trying to attract younger customers? People who don’t have a history with the record store, whose life experience is downloading stuff from iTunes?

RF: It’s a tough one, and obviously it’s the biggest issue facing the entire music industry - how you connect with a younger audience who doesn’t have a connection to the business side of the music business. And for us, it’s creating a sense of community; creating something that they want to be part of. There are a lot of kids that come in and buy downloads that still want to come to our events, that still want to be part of what’s happening here and still have an appreciation for Fingerprints as a part of the community. So if it ends up being that, we kind of have to accept that, I guess.  Short of charging admission, I don’t know how we would monetize or factor that in to the business plan. I think that just needs to be part of our cultural awareness part of what we do, which is hopefully we can get those kids to realize that it’s kind of cool to have this stuff, and they certainly come in and look at it and some of them have an appreciation for it, and there are a tremendous amount of kids who have really embraced vinyl. So I think it’s person-by-person…if we talk to them and they’re dead-set to buy their music digitally, well maybe they’ll buy the CD and digitize it themselves, which has still got to be cheaper if you factor in trade-in value, so there’s different ways to turn a digital user into a customer, and we’re working on how to best do that.

SG: How aware are you of the need to have a digital equivalent of the store as a way of doing that outreach?

RF: I tell my staff regularly that we’re in the information business and we’re in the experience business primarily, and that our secondary thing is that we’re in the physical goods business, because realistically, with the internet and with all the other options people have, I recognize that, when somebody makes a choice to come in and shop here, they are choosing out of many choices. We’re definitely fighting an uphill battle on fast and on price, so we have to win on experience—both our staff’s experience and the experience we provide. So I feel like that’s what I want our digital side and our website to convey information about who we are, about what it is we do, and make the sale secondary because, realistically, that’s not an experience business, or really the business that I think we find ourselves in. The reality is, at this point, the digital music sales players are pretty well-defined and it’s a very difficult battle to try to get into that. Amazon lost a lot of money before they ever turned a profit... iTunes has always had hardware sales to prop up any decline in digital sales. So neither of those guys would have the same kind of horse in that race that I would have to have. We can’t afford it, quite frankly.

SG: Beyond the core music part of the store, you also have an extensive book section…and a bistro/coffeehouse: Why these other elements?

RF: To go back to ‘Why open a record store in 2011?’; It just feels like the right thing to do. The books, the DVDs, the other products—there’s a little bit of hedging our bets there, because diversification is certainly a way to stay relevant, but at the same time, we’ve chosen to diversify into things that are widely acknowledged as dead media. [Laughs]

We have a sign on the front that says “Music, Literature, Art and Culture,” and I really toyed with “A Celebration of Dead Media” [laughs] as our new tagline.  But we’ve never called it dead—that’s the popular press. I don’t put a lot of stock in that. I buy books, I buy movies, I buy toys… Everything we’ve done has been predicated on “would I buy this?” And we’re not big on mainstream, although we certainly have it and we certainly help those customers who are looking for it; it’s not how we define ourselves.  So it is an extension of my interests because that’s what I know. We don’t sell auto parts because I’m not a car guy, but I am a book guy and I am a movie guy and I am a music guy, so that’s kind of where my store goes.

As far as the coffeehouse goes, the owner is Kerstin Kansteiner, and she owns two other coffeehouses on this same street—one called Portfolio and the other an Annex of Portfolio. Both are very successful. I’ve known her for 20 years. Since she opened up, we’ve crossed paths professionally quite a bit over that same period, and she has a lot of the same ideas. She has a real appreciation for the experience. Her coffeehouse is consistently rated the best coffeehouse in Long Beach. That means something to me because, again, people are choosing that experience. You go into her store just about any time of day and she’s got a huge crowd. You come in here and we generally have a crowd. I think we’re on the same kind of path, where it’s provide a clean, comfortable, well-lighted place that people will feel comfortable and feel at home in, and the rest kind of follows. I’m very much about doing what feels right, and I feel like she is in that same position.

SG: You’ve talked two or three times about experience—that’s really what you’re building, is an experience. What are the hallmarks of that Fingerprints experience in this new store?

RF: When I grew up, there was a bookstore in the town I lived in that was called “The Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books”, and I felt like that was such an appropriate name for what they offered.  Fingerprints doesn’t have exactly that, but that spirit is very much what I want. I want it to be a welcoming place. If you look around, we don’t have video screens…there’s so many great visuals already in the room that…I kind of want to give people a bit of a place to come to get away from that. So I think that maybe that this is a place to go that develops into some sort of a community center, someplace where people would meet on their way out somewhere. My hope is that people will stop, they’ll pick up a coffee, they’ll meet their friends here, and then they’ll head out to whatever it is their evening’s plans are. That would be phenomenal. And then, on occasions when we’re having an event, hopefully we are the evening’s plan.

The other thing is that I think our staff is phenomenal. We have a tremendous amount of experience - we did a thing in our business plan where we talked to the staff (and our staff is only 15 people) and found out that we have something like 250 years of music/record retailing experience! We also have several staffers in touring bands that work here when they’re not on tour, we have people on staff that are film majors, and I just feel like that’s the kind of thing that you can’t replicate. No many how many bots you have on your website that virtually recommend that you’re gonna love this because you bought that, unless you’re having a discussion with somebody, it’s guessing at best. And I think we’re in a position to actually have discussions about music and movies and book and to actually talk to people… You have to talk the talk as well as walk the walk.

So that’s the master plan: to be a haven for when people want to get away from the computer for a few minutes and have a face-to-face experience, to touch something that’s real and hopefully walk away richer for having done it.

SG: Where do you hope this is in a year?

RF: Hopefully unpacked [laughs].

I’m in such a short-term “Let’s get it open” kind of mindset…but I would love to see this be something where a lot of what I’ve just talked about has been realized. There are people coming in, they’re getting a coffee, they’re sitting in our new living-room area that’s conducive having conversations, we’re hoping to work with the university and have open-mic nights with some spoken word elements to it, we’re hoping to have gallery shows, obviously we’ll continue with the in-stores… So I hope it becomes kind of a buzzing hub and a place that people make their plans around, and I think the experience is there, and I think we’ve got a shot at it.

SG: Can you sum up that new Fingerprints in a sentence?

RF: Music, Art, Literature and Culture…because we’ve given up on “The celebration of dead media.” [Laughs]

The all-new Fingerprints Records is located at 420 4^th Street in downtown Long Beach.

Upcoming Fingerprints in-store events this month include a live performance from G. Love on February 22nd.

Look for more details on the soon-to-be re-launched www.fingerprintsmusic.com.