Cool Cleveland Interview

Melanie Hershberger and Kevin Neudecker of Music Saves
By Pete Chakerian

For Melanie Hershberger and Kevin Neudecker, co-owners and operators of the record shop Music Saves, that stands to reason. The two self-professed music junkies started off with nothing more than a casual idea for the business as they were co-hosting a college radio show.

But they knew what they loved: Indie rock. Vinyl records. DIY ethics. And a good CD buy. That’s where the idea of Music Saves blossomed from.

“We didn’t have any of the experience in college related to the music industry or running a business or anything like that,” says Hershberger. “It was just the idea of leaving college and having to find that average, regular full-time job which just really didn’t agree with me. This seemed right.”

“Before we knew it, we were sitting in front of the loan officer at the bank,” adds Neudecker. “It happened just that fast… and running a business like ours gives us the opportunity to stay current on all of the new music I would be interested in anyway. You know around 25 years old whether or not you’re committed to music for the long haul. We’re committed.”

Fast-forward a year: Hershberger, Neudecker and their black cat Vinyl keep hours that coincide with shows at the Beachland Ballroom next door. They both have second jobs to support themselves. They sink every penny of profit back into Music Saves for now. No salaries. It’s a labor of love to the nth degree; the storefront formerly known as a Waterloo barber shop in Collinwood now celebrates its first birthday in business this week.

Those next door neighbors at the Beachland will host an all-ages show celebrating “MUSIC SAVES 1st Anniversary Party” on July 15. The show features Constantines, Oxford Collapse and Coffinberry. (Kiddo is no longer on the bill). And you can bet your Autolux that it’s gonna rock and that Music Saves will be open for you when the party’s over.

Cool Cleveland recently talked to Hershberger and Neudecker about the pleasure, pain and salvation of the past 365 days in business.

Melanie Hershberger: Well, we were in our fifth year of college, our last year at Bowling Green, and we were doing a show together on WBGU called “The Seventeenth Grade.” Basically, there were two radio stations on campus and one of them was relatively mainstream—playing stuff that you would already hear elsewhere anyway. It was not your idea of a “college radio station” at all. And at WBGU, we had the freedom to play everything the other station wasn’t. Free-format, more independent, more unknown bands. We had a lot of fun doing it and just started throwing around the idea of doing a store then. It felt natural.'''

Kevin Neudecker: Yeah, you know, why not open up a “lo-carb” store? (laughs) When we talked about opening up a record store, we knew we didn’t want it to be just some anesthetized store in a strip mall. I’ve been to a lot of other cities where record stores were located next to a concert venue—like [Hi-Fi] which is right next to the Metro in Chicago—and they carried stuff the venue was actually bringing into town. That was as close to a business model for us as anything.

Happy birthday! Where do you see the store next year at this time?
MH: I hope we’re here a year from now! (laughs) We’re actually doing very well.

KN: In a year from now, we’ll have all of our debts paid off, which currently constitutes a big chunk of our money every month to keep the place open and [stocked]. It seems like we’re dumping this big bundle of cash into a hole and not getting anything back for it. When that’s paid off, we’ll probably see a bigger build-up of the inventory.

MH: [Those] loans constitute about 70% of our expenses.

Was Collinwood always going to be the location for Music Saves?
KN: Well, we talked about Coventry and the Grog Shop initially, but that really wasn’t realistic unless you had a lot of money and capital to start out with, which we didn’t… I had been to the Beachland a few times and I always liked who they were bringing into town. And financially, it was the most appropriate place to establish ourselves and cater to the music we really get into. It all made [Waterloo Road] a pretty easy decision for where we wanted to be.

MH: Being isolated was never in the plans. And being next to a venue was always a cool idea. People wouldn’t have to make a special trip to find us or struggle to locate us and we knew that it would also be good for business—

A built-in clientele—
MH: Yes! And being next to the Beachland, we are able to help each other out. They call us about bands they are thinking about booking and we call them to figure out if there are things that we should be thinking about carrying. There’s a lot of back-and-forth helping each other out, in an entrepreneurial sense. We depend and rely on each other to keep the word out there about the other.

KN: But it’s also more genuine than that and not driven by a “I hope people go so they spend money with us and at the Beachland” mentality. That’s just the good fortune of the relationship and a byproduct of us loving music and getting to meet and connect with other people who love music. Like the folks at the Beachland.

MH: And you know, to your earlier point, people already know what Coventry is. We’re excited about what Waterloo is—and has potential to be—as time goes on.

Any “buyer’s remorse” after you made the leap into retail? Any big moment of fear and panic that set in? After such a big commitment…?
KN: Not really panic, I think. But there were certainly many times where we were both like, “My god.” But it was more nervous than anything else, because anything you care about and have passion for, you know, you want to be successful… once we got the green light, there was really no going back.

MH: It was more like that feeling you have when you’re getting married, or how you hear people talk about having children, or any of those big-life events. You’re excited, but equally afraid because you just don’t know how everything is going to work out, even despite your best intentions. In that situation, you do ask the question “Are we going to be able to do this?” a lot. And “Are we physically and mentally able to pull this off?” It’s a big responsibility.

KN: There was never a question of going back or giving up… at this point, I’d rather be a failure at this than a success at a long list of other things. (laughs)

It crossed my mind that a lot of the equipment, shelving and other store supplies you have was purchased from the fire sale that My Generation [in Westlake] had when it failed—
KN: You can’t say that My Generation failed. They survived for 20 years—

Yeah. I agree. There wasn’t another store with a more impressive and eclectic inventory. So, OK. Poor choice of a word. Let’s say, expired—
KN: Well, I don’t know all of the financial details, but it seemed like they had done it for a long time and just decided to stop. They did try to sell the business and perhaps the passion to fight it out just wasn’t there anymore? Who can say? You know, we can only hope to be in business for 20 years like they were.

With that experience in mind, what do you see as the biggest challenge or obstacle in being Cleveland small business owners today?
MH: Getting to your target audience… and knowing that from the beginning it will be difficult financially. I don’t think anyone can be prepared for what it’s all actually like. We’re not paying ourselves and it will be a while yet before we can do that. All of the money we make we are putting back into the store and paying off the loans. As for the audience, music is a big umbrella. When you start to narrow it down by genre and demographics and other things, you eventually end up with a very narrow group of people you’re catering to. And you wonder “Are there enough of these people in Cleveland to keep us open?”

Are there enough of these people in Cleveland to keep you open?
MH: I think so. And we do get a lot of people come from out of town to go to the Beachland, which makes up for when things get slower in town—

KN: It seems like there are. Most of our [local] customers know we’re not trying to play salesman with them; they come in and we get to talk about music with them. The people who come here from out of town are just as particular about what they’re looking for. They’re not going to find this music at their local Wal-Mart! (laughs). They come in and spend a lot of money and they do it more out of necessity for finding what they want. And the stuff that’s in here, you’re not going to find it by accident. We’re not catering to the casual music fan. It’s not a huge market. For these people, music is more of a way of life than anything—

MH: Well, yeah, but the economy being good or bad can have a direct effect on that as well. When we were in college we thought CDs were a necessity, like food. We were poor and so you didn’t eat sometimes... We’d be our best customers and that’s sort of how we modeled the store. But for other people, [music] is not that important. When people are low on funds, well, maybe they’re not thinking of us. Maybe they’re thinking about the grocery store. (laughs)

How did the local and regional traffic from the CMJ events treat you, from a business perspective?
KN: We did really well, actually. Especially after the Stephen Malkmus gig and with Spoon. After the Spoon gig, we were open 1:30 in the morning and had a lot of traffic. We actually doubled our sales after that show, but it wasn’t the latest we’ve been open—

What’s the latest you’ve been open after a Beachland gig?
KN: When Guided by Voices let out, we were open until 3:30 in the morning.

That is pretty impressive, by any measure.
KN: It’s interesting. You know, the CMJ weekend was good for us, and we did get a lot of customers into the store. But we have had equally busy times on normal weekends, where the Beachland has had a lot going on next door as well.

Let’s backtrack for a moment. Because your customers really are so particular about tunes, do you worry about making a recommendation to them—knowing full well they could hate it? Or what that might lead to?
MH: Well… I have to admit that I get nervous about stuff like that sometimes. (laughs) Some of our customers can be very particular and others… you can make a recommendation to them and they’ll buy it without pause. You don’t want people to be disappointed or questioning a purchase.

KN: I get the most anxious when I do suggest something I like [to a customer] and they actually walk out with it. And then I’m like, “Oh my god, what if they don’t like it?!?” Sometimes, after they leave, I have to go and put that disc back on and try to imagine them listening to it for the first time. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. (laughs)

Has Vinyl the Cat ever been just lying in a bin and unknowingly made a recommendation to you, or a sale to a customer, just by where she was?
KN: I don’t think so. (laughs) Not that we know of. We always joke that she tries to get people to buy Cat Power. But no strange feline coincidences at all.

You know, the thing I always liked about going into a record shop is that tangible nature of it… the tactile sensation of holding that purchase—
KN: I always liked the surprise nature of finding something that you read about a few months before and then finding it in a bin after it almost left your mind.

MH: Exactly. And that’s something you just don’t get from shopping online.

Any guilty listening pleasures you’d like to share with ''Cool Cleveland?
(long pause… both looking at each other with rather cautious smiles)
MH: You want us to tell you this in an interview for the Internet? (laughs)

We’ll go off the record with that one… So, were any of these so-called guilty pleasures sacrificed for your [used] inventory? I heard you liquidated a huge assortment of your own collection when you first opened the store?
MH: We did do it out of necessity. We wanted to have a solid used CD section, but it was also an economic thing, too, and not having the finances to go out and purchase used stock… All the really, really good stuff went right away, within the first week. After that, we sort of realized what we had done. By the six month period, if someone brought one of our CDs up to the counter—and it wasn’t something really obvious or something I took for granted—I would get sad.

KN: We donated our CDs with the idea that every time somebody buys one, it is 100% profit—

A great profit margin, but was it painful? After a stint without employment, I can’t even imagine doing that with my collection again—
MH: It wasn’t painful at first for me. I was more impressed with how good our used section was! (laughs) We didn’t put the “limited edition” stuff out there with after the first round of [discs] left the section, later on, you’d totally forget about some of them you didn’t like that much anyway.

KN: Well, we were the only store that had all the Radiohead CDs in the used section at one point. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anywhere else! (laughs) Most of the people we had talked to who had opened their own record store had done the same thing and shared the same pain in their stories, too—

MH: The sadness passed quickly because we knew the CDs were leaving our collection for another good home. They might even like the music more than I do. That made it far less painful for me—

KN: Besides, you know music fans... you keep a list of that stuff in your head and if it was anything worth having the first time, well, we bought those CDs once. We’ll probably buy them all over again! (laughs)

Interview and photos by Peter Chakerian peter_chakerian@yahoo.com (:divend:)