CMT Blog: Archive

A few weeks ago, Darius Rucker was cruising through Columbia, S.C., and he thought he'd drop by Sounds Familiar, the old record store where he used to work.

"I was going to see if there were people that I know there -- and it's not there anymore," he says. "The store's gone. You just go, ‘Wow.' Record stores are going by the wayside. It's sad. I remember when I worked retail, you had those people that came and hung out and listened to music. You would play them something that they never heard before and they'd buy it. That was a great time to play something and have somebody come buy it. That was such a cool feeling. The way that I discovered so many records was by somebody in the store playing it. That's how I discovered Nanci Griffith. I walked in the store and somebody was playing Once in a Very Blue Moon."

Along with writing his recommendations on tiny pieces of paper, Rucker says he was also the Billboard reporter at his store before the advent of Soundscan. "That was awesome! Payola!" he says with a hearty laugh. "I did singles for a while and I did albums for a while. They called every week, and you would write down on a sheet of paper they would send you every week, and you'd write down your Top 100 singles and you just rattle them off to Billboard magazine. I mean, the stories I could tell you of people calling and saying, ‘Hey man, do you think you could put so and so in the top 10?' I'm like, ‘Dude, they're not even in my top 50.' And they're like, ‘You like U2?' ‘Yeah!' And the next day here come four CD players and the whole U2 collection. You gotta love it!"