What goes around comes around, and around, and around, and around…
“Three years ago, I was thumbing through an article in Forbes magazine predicting that vinyl was going to be the next wave in music,” says Joe Weber, owner of Audiogazing, located at 200 S. Michigan Avenue. “Last year vinyl sold 10 million units, up from 4 million the year before.”
That article was one of the seeds the started the idea for Audiogazing.
“We started over at the SVRC Marketplace which is a fantastic place to start a small business,” says Weber. “I couldn’t sleep one night and was thumbing through MLive on my phone. I came across an article about the Marketplace opening and we went and turned in an application two days before the deadline.”
But Audiogazing quickly outgrew their booth at the Marketplace, and moved into their current location in Old Town Saginaw.
While enthusiasm for vinyl records can soar into passioned (and expensive) levels, Weber says that his shop caters to new vinyl listeners or people looking to get into vinyl for the first time.
“We carry music from the eighties and nineties that, because of being during the CD age, were never pressed to vinyl and are coming out on records for the first time,” he says. “We also carry a lot of new artists and record players that are on the less expensive side.”
Weber says that the excitement of digging through racks of records is limited to a single demographic of people.
“We have people from 16 to 60-years-old come through here,” says Weber. He also sees a wide appeal present in what Downtown and Old Town Saginaw have to offer.
“I’m totally geeked about the transition that Riverfront Saginaw is making,” he says. “With all the other small businesses here and more looking to move into the area, we want Audiogazing to be here until I retire, for decades.”
