Schoolkids Records closing Franklin Street store

Chapel Hill will soon be without one of its most venerable music institutions: Schoolkids Records, a Franklin Street fixture since the 1970s, will close at the end of March.

It's not the end of the Schoolkids chain, which has stores in Raleigh and Athens, Ga. But there used to be seven Schoolkids stores across the Southeast.

"It was a tough decision, but the world has changed and the business has changed," says Mike Phillips, owner of Raleigh-based Schoolkids. "A lot of my friends across the country with college stores are all singing the same tune," he said. "It blows me away that in a town with 30,000-plus college kids, they don't come to the store anymore."

In recent years, the record industry has been hit hard by consumers who burn their own compact discs or illegally download music. Album sales have dropped 36 percent this decade to 500 million last year from a high of 785 million in 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The decline has been even more dramatic for independent music retailers, who compete against illegal copying of music and online and big-box retailers such as Amazon.com, iTunes and Best Buy.

Ric Culross, general manager of the two Triangle Schoolkids stores, remembers a few years ago when there were four record stores within a few blocks of one another on Franklin Street.

"All together, those stores did $250,000 in music sales every month," Culross says. "Now the others are gone, and we're the only music store left there, and we've not even done a fifth of that in the last two or three years."

After Schoolkids contracts, each Triangle town will be down to one large independent music retailer. There's CD Alley, farther west on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill; Bull City Records in Durham; and the Raleigh Schoolkids -- which, Phillips says, will probably move from Hillsborough Street when its lease is up this year.

"It is frightening, this trend," says Ryan Richardson, owner of CD Alley. "But I feel we fill a niche that can be sustained for some time to come by focusing more on appealing to the collector than the casual fan."