C OVE R STORY
&VINYL &more In Clarksville, at the corner of Franklin St. and 2nd St., you'll find &Vinyl, poised perfectly at the convergence of two trends, America's rekindled passion for vinyl records, and the resurgence of a long-struggling downtown. For music lovers, this little record shop creates a perfect blend of old and new. Rolling Stone magazine wrote of vinyl's comeback in 2019, with the headline “Vinyl is Poised to Outsell CDs For the First Time Since 1986”. But, that was not news to prescient entrepreneurs Matthew and Tony Shrum who opened &Vinyl on November 5, 2018. “We've been here for 16 months now,” Tony Shrum said. “We only had a few display cases when we started. Looking back, it was a little embarrassing. Those old pictures make us say, man, that's a lot of growth.”
“I've done sound at a blues and jazz venue,” Shrum said. “I currently work for a music magazine, New Noise, based out of Berkeley. We cover punk, metal and hardcore. I've always been surrounded by music. I've done publicity for bands. I've been on the road with them doing merchandise. It made sense for me to open a record store, and it has really been fun so far.” Matthew and Tony's mother was stationed at Fort Campbell for two years. The family moved to Germany, then California, but migrated back to Clarksville upon retirement. “We like it here,” Shrum said. “Downtown was
Rapid growth came from reinvesting everything back into the store. “We wanted this to grow quickly,” Shrum said. “Now I look around and think, we have a lot of merchandise. We've gone from a couple of sparsely filled display racks to a store that is overflowing with LP's, 45s, cassettes, and music-related art. “We have a great selection of new and used inventory. We started with just 500 to 1,000 records, now we have several thousand, and more stored at my house.” Looking at Tony, you immediately think, musician, but that's not the case. He has, however, been surrounded by music for years.
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Clarksville Living
By Tony Centonze starting to pick up. We saw a for lease sign on the window of this building, and had our deposit down within a couple of hours. I had been talking about this for a while, how cool it would be to have a record store. “We wanted to create that record store vibe. You come in and there's cool music playing, and everywhere you look you see records, music posters and t-shirts. This is what you would see if you Googled 'record store'.” Tony says, he and Matt discovered music later in life. “I was in my teens before I started finding my own musical interests,” Shrum said. “Before that, I listened to what my parents played, mostly 90's country. From there, I
