Jazz music pulsates to the ebb and flow of customers buying and selling in the store. A bespectacled, wide-eyed man walks in, nodding to some of the regular customers. His soft-spoken presence is known and noted silently, without grandeur. He is Joseph GaNun, the current owner of Academy Records & CDs; the vast collection his store sells precedes him.
GaNun’s store is perhaps as antiquated as much of the films and music it sells. While almost any song or movie can be downloaded on iTunes, viewed on YouTube, or torrented from Putlocker, Academy buys and sells long-forgotten and dusty LPs and CDs to the niche who care for aural purity. Even after more than 20 years, the store thrives.
Escaping the hectic state of the store, sit down on the bright green bench outside Fishs Eddy on 19th and Broadway. “We’re like a married couple,” GaNun quips, speaking into an audio recorder less than 5 inches from his face.
For someone who runs a store that sells films and music in various formats, GaNun’s childhood was ironically devoid of the arts. Born in 1957, he grew up in the suburbs of Northport in Long Island. He noted that his house was quite mundane, calling it, “the great American void of vapidity.”
Yet, GaNun believes that the lack of music in his house spurred his “fanatical” interest in the medium; by watching Looney Tunes cartoons for the music, he would find the specific tracks at his local public library, and discover compositions that he never heard before. From there, he was hooked. “One thing just led to another, and here I am,” he said. “Nothing to write home about.”
When he turned 17, GaNun moved out, and enrolled at Hunter College on the Upper East Side. Studying music, he believes that his time at Hunter gave him a sense of purpose. “Growing up in the suburbs, most of my peers were dropping acid, doing drugs, and dropping out of life,” GaNun recalls. “I was thrilled to be in an environment where you could have teachers that could talk about any subject…. it just opened up another world to me.”
GaNun is not the original owner of Academy Records & CDs, which was not a record store until the mid-90s. It first opened in 1977 as Academy Book Store, owned by Alan Weiner. GaNun began working at Academy in 1981, starting at the bottom by sweeping floors and checking bags. Eventually, Weiner promoted GaNun, when he noticed his young employee’s interest in music. GaNun was then given more responsibilities, steadily moving up the chain of command. “Every time I was given a responsibility, I wanted more,” he says.
Such tasks included bookkeeping and accounting, which GaNun was in charge of for 6 years. He claims that this experience provided him with critical technical and organizational skills. “I knew how all the finances worked,” he says. “That’s why I felt like I could run my own business.”
Joseph GaNun, current owner of Academy Records & CDs
By 1994, GaNun made it his goal to have his own store. One crucial motivating factor behind this was Weiner’s attempted suicide that same year. GaNun originally wanted to start his own company, but Weiner persuaded him to stay.
“He probably knew that the store would probably fail without me around,” he asserts. A mutual agreement was set between the two men on finding a second location.
In 1995, the new store opened right next to the old one – its given name has not changed since. Shortly after, Weiner committed suicide. Without any provisions in the case of his death, Weiner’s family opted to close the bookstore permanently. However, GaNun had an “ironclad” contract with the record store he was operating – allowing it to remain in business. The Academy Book Store’s final day was Dec. 31, 1999.
GaNun recalls feeling sad on that fateful day. “I kept hoping that, somehow, the family would wake up, and they would want the business to keep operating,” he says. “But it was not in their desires to see that happen.”
Academy Records & CDs
While facing high turnover rates in his early years of running the record store, GaNun eventually managed to maintain a stable core of less than 10 regular, long-term employees (one of whom has worked at the store for nearly 20 years), and some additional part-time workers.
“Everyone works as a team, and we know each other,” he says. “The nice thing is that there’s no egos involved…. Everyone knows each other’s personality traits and quirks. Sometimes it can be like a dysfunctional family.”
Like GaNun two decades prior, his employees are there due to their own passion for music. “They really wouldn’t like to be doing anything else,” he says. “They’d like to be making more money, but not at the expense of not having any music in their lives.”
Surprisingly, he argues that the advent of digital music in the following years after did not perturb his business. GaNun views such consumers as, “people that never collected music anyway, so I never really viewed them as being my customers.” By contrast, he believes that the overall “suicidal” practices of the record industry have challenged the longevity of his store. He claims that the big culprit was Tower Records, in deliberately selling records below cost, in order to entice customers to shop at their stores, putting all of their competition out of business.
“Years and years of doing incredibly stupid things, based on short-term greed,” GaNun said. “So no longer do we have any vision anymore in the United States. Everything is based on, ‘how rich can I get in the next 3 months?’”
GaNun lives with his wife in Brooklyn, and has a daughter in college. Unlike his own childhood, GaNun kept a place for the arts in his house for his family. His daughter was, “always exposed to books. She’s a bookworm,” he says.
“Music has always been in the house to play,” he continued. While GaNun says that he never “pushed” music onto his family, it was always there to be exposed and discovered in the house. “I never had the attitude of, ‘you must listen to Beethoven, because that’s written music, that’s art,’” he said. “My feeling is that it turns people off that way.”
Even though he’s nearing 60 years of age, GaNun has no plans to retire anytime soon. “I would like to be doing this until the day I drop dead,” he said. “We were evolved to keep moving. Once you stop moving, you stagnate. Once you stagnate, you die.”
Ezra Wolfgang 