An Inside Look at Our Interviews with the Curators of the City
Words by Avery Martin; Photos by Lydia Norton
LUNA Music has built a reputation for thoughtful curation and genuine connection. Alongside College Ave, the shop serves as a gathering place for a tight-knit community of music lovers to explore new sounds. I interviewed employee Alex Johnson, and he shares how the shop listens to its customers, supports under-the-radar music, and keeps the experience of physical media alive.
Avery Martin: How would you describe your shop’s philosophy when it comes to curating music?
Alex Johnson: We all love music a ton, so it's all about shining a light on stuff that we think people would really like. Customer feedback is also a huge piece of that; we always encourage customers to let us know if there's something that they're looking for that we don't carry, because we want to do a better job at filling in those gaps.
AM: What do you think sets your store apart in Indy’s vinyl landscape?
AJ: We've been here for thirty years, we really put community first, and we love connecting with our customers. We have a subscription service where people sign up, they fill out a survey based on their taste, we pick records, and then we send them every month. We really love being curators in that way.
AM: What does community mean to you in the context of a record store?
AJ: We really believe in the idea of a third place. Being that place where someone can go, if you want to come in and connect about music, or you need a place to just hang out and talk to somebody, we are that place.
AM: What kind of music do you find yourselves gravitating toward when curating for the store?
AJ: We've done a really good job of curating under-the-radar selections. Stuff that’s a little off the beaten path, a little experimental, a little electronic. We try to give smaller labels a little shine.
AM: Are there any local musicians or bands you’ve supported early on?
AJ: One of our favorite local bands is called Wishy, our part-time employee Kevin's band. We really like it when local artists come in and bring their physical media to sell. We invite anyone in the neighborhood or the community to come in and bring their records, tapes, or CDs and sell them in our store on a consignment basis.
AM: What do you think keeps people coming back to physical media, even when we don’t need it?
AJ: First off, it's tangible; you're able to hold it and own it, especially in the environment of streaming today. People are removing their music from Spotify and Apple Music, so I think increasingly people want to own their music.
AM: What do you think people get from vinyl that they can’t get from digital?
AJ: There's a mastering element that is kind of important, especially for older music. If you have an analog medium, it's really important to try to master it analog if you can. Most modern music isn't mastered analog, but if you have an older record or a reissue of an older record, having an all-analog signal path is going to give you a really good fidelity when you play it.
AM: What musical artist best captures the spirit of your store?
AJ: Prince probably captures the spirit of the shop more than any other artist, for sure.
