Smokin’! Amoeba Gets License To Sell Weed Alongside Music
In what looks to be an ideal marketing pairing, Berkeley CA based record store Amoeba Music will soon be complimenting its traditional musical offerings with marijuana, hopefully helping to keep another brick and mortar record store's doors open.
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Guest Post by Bobby Owsinski on Music 3.0
In what seems to be a match made in heaven, the Amoeba Music record store based in Berkeley, CA can soon begin selling marijuana as well. An Amoeba employee leaked the announcement on Facebook, according to Fact. It’s been reported that the store intends to put a dispensary where its current Jazz Room is now located to handle the sales.
While Amoeba is still one of the largest record store chains still left standing in terms of overall sales volume, it only generates about half the revenue that it did in 2008, according to co-founder Marc Weinstein. If there ever was a product that was perfect for a brick and mortar store, it’s marijuana, and for many, there’s no better place to distribute it than a record store. Amoeba already houses a medical marijuana doctor, which would make it a one-stop-shop so to speak, although that could be a moot point since a referendum for total legalization of the weed is on the ballot in November.
Of course, the big problem with music sales is still the convenience of the format, and streaming has physical product beat no matter how baked you are. That said, Amoeba’s move could predict a wave of the future for record stores in general, where marijuana dispensaries sell music, and record stores house dispensaries. Either way, you’d have to believe that the foot traffic through a record store would improve dramatically thanks to weed availability.
Amoeba Music’s dispensary doesn’t yet have an opening date though, since it has a number of permits still pending from Berkeley’s Department of Planning and Development. It’s still only a matter of time before Berkeley, and Amoeba, leads the nation on this front once again.
