Laurie’s Planet of Sound has been a fixture of Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood since 1997. Located down the street from the 80-year-old Davis Theater cinema, Laurie’s doesn’t waste an inch of its space, offering customers new and used CDs, LPs, and DVDs (a sizable portion of which are music-related, e.g. concerts and documentaries) as well as previously viewed VHS tapes.

Back in March I wanted to buy a copy of Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records after reviewing it for Popdose. Laurie’s didn’t have it in stock, but they were more than happy to order it for me. And when I recently brought a new copy of Sloan’s Navy Blues up to the counter, I was offered a used copy that cost half as much — but I refused! Know why? Because we all need to support our local independent record stores, and Laurie’s is my favorite in the Windy City. One of its employees, Melissa, was kind enough to answer a few questions recently about the Planet of Sound and its particular place in the music-retail universe.

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Much has been made in recent years of the abrupt decline of our friendly neighborhood record stores — the mom-and-pop shops (and, in the case of the dearly departed Tower Records, national chains) where we whiled away hours spent browsing the racks for new stuff to listen to.

The stores were sucker-punched in the mid-’90s by a below-board alliance between the major distributors and big-box retailers like Best Buy, then driven nearly to extinction by the industry-wide death spiral that started near the turn of the century. But even if there aren’t as many of them as there used to be, record stores are still out there, and given that the Popdose staff is spread all over the country (heck, one of us is in Norway!), we figure we’re in a unique position to tell you about our favorite music-purchasing destinations.

You might not think that rural New Hampshire would have any record stores worth a damn anywhere in a 100-mile radius — I certainly didn’t expect to find any when I moved here — but lo and behold, not half an hour from my house, there’s the Keene location of Turn It Up!

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