Still Spinning

One record chain has bet big on a new appetite for physical media

- RICHARD TRAPUNSKI

THE ONLY WAY INTO Cloverdale Mall is through a parking lot. Here, in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, the world of retail is languid and sprawling, with a noticeably older demographic than in its downtown equivalents. A walk through the one-storey mall will take you past discount clothing outlets and an all-but-forgotten bookstore chain. Around a corner, past a Chinese food stall called Pick 'N' Chus, is a familiar red and black sign: SUNRISE.

A series of mostly unadorned shelves are packed with DVDs, vinyl records, and CDs organized by genre: punk, metal, jazz, blues, and hip hop. Near the front is a slogan: "Canada's Record Store."

A similar Sunrise Records once sat on Yonge Street, right in the heart of the city. The homegrown retail chain was part of a string of major record stores such as Sam the Record Man and HMV Canada, plus independents such as Play De Record. Those shops all disappeared from Yonge over the past few decades, along with the other big Canadian chains Music World and A&A, pushed out by major shifts in how music is distributed and consumed: digitally, on file-sharing sites such as Napster, on the iTunes store, and eventually on streaming giants like Spotify and Apple Music, or ordered for delivery online. But Sunrise, first launched in 1977, is still around, though it no longer has a home in downtown Toronto. "I've had people telling me that record stores are closing for probably ten or fifteen years now," says Robert Lawson, the store manager at the Cloverdale location for much of its twenty-year history. "Well, we're still here, and I'm still here. So I think, as long as they're still making CDs and making records, there will still be room for record stores."