Facing the music

Early last month, behind the facades of Gower Gulch, that Old West town of Baskin-Robbins, Rite Aid and a Denny's restaurant facing Sunset Boulevard, some 46 vocalists and one showgirl poured into Hollywood Studio Bar and Grill, banding together for a cause the only way they know how -- by unleashing, for more than four hours, tunes about ducks that samba and personalizing the lyrics of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen."

The brainchild of Effie Joy, this sold-out October fundraiser had no charismatic politician on the receiving end, no poster children nor cocktails-by-the-pool donor list. It was just a modest attempt to stave off the bankruptcy of Hollywood Sheet Music, a fellow mom-and-pop shop in another strip mall two miles to the west.

"It might not save them, but it will help them," Joy, a veteran of L.A.'s cabaret circuit, said on a cigarette break. "They're a landmark, and they're being replaced, sadly. The Internet's just taken everything away."

Hollywood Sheet Music has grown increasingly anachronistic in a downloadable world. The shop is a favorite among celebrities and researchers who prize its archive, which dates back in some cases to the early 1900s and includes many first editions.

But as the sheet music business, like so many other segments of the industry, migrated online, the store has found itself at a crossroads: Sheet music might be a nearly $600-million-a-year business in the U.S., enjoying a largely steady 2% to 3% growth rate over the past decade, but sales at Hollywood Sheet Music have fallen off the charts.

Overtaken by technology

Three weeks after the fundraiser, there's little activity to report. Store manager Rick Starr sits at the green Formica counter, answering the phone as he eats a lunch of hot dogs and KFC sides, while owner Stephanie Rinaldo explains that, over three locations and four decades, her business had always been recession-proof. In its heyday, it wasn't unusual for her to clock in 60 hours a week researching client requests. Times have changed. Recently, she was happy to sell a stack of surplus inventory as set dressing for the prop department of the ABC television series "Eli Stone."

David Jahnke, vice president of national sales for Hal Leonard Corp., the largest print music publisher, ranks Hollywood Sheet Music as one of the handful of such stores in the country -- his executives consider visits there to be an important part of their market research. But he said Rinaldo's reluctance to move into the online world was the beginning of her current woes.