This weekend, Plan 9 Music marks 45 years in Richmond with a party at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery.
Over the past four and a half decades, the Richmond institution weathered some of the most turbulent periods in music history. It closed stores, sold its warehouse and dramatically shrank its footprint, surviving industry changes that forced thousands of independent record shops across the country out of business.
But for owner Jim Bland the anniversary isn’t about looking back as much as it is recognizing the people who helped Plan 9 get here.
“That’s kind of why we’re doing this,” Bland said. “To say thank you to our extended community and the bands that play around here.”
For generations of Richmond musicians and music fans, Plan 9 has been much more than a place to buy records. It’s where people discovered new bands, bought tickets to local shows, met touring artists and, in many cases, found their place within Richmond’s music scene.
When Bland opened Plan 9 in 1981, he wasn’t thinking about anniversaries. “When we opened, I just hoped to be able to survive and make a living at it,” he said. “I’d been working for other people for years and finally had a chance, with a partner at the time, to step out on our own.”
At the time, Bland was working at an independent record store in Petersburg. Instead of quitting outright, he spent nearly a year building Plan 9 while keeping his day job. His business partner ran the store during the day while Bland worked nights and weekends before eventually making the leap full time.
“My former employer was very helpful with me making that transition,” Bland said. “I worked for him for almost a year before I actually was able to quit completely and work just for me and my partner. So he covered the daytime. I came in the nights and worked on the weekends while I was doing the other job and training other people to take over.”
Richmond’s music scene was beginning to take shape. “Tom and Marty (Tom Campagnoli and Marty McCavitt of The Tom & Marty Band) played our first anniversary in the front room of our little store,” Bland recalled. “Around that time, I’d see the Orthotonics, the Good Guys, Panorama, all these bands. The punk scene was really getting going.”
Plan 9 quickly became more than a record store. It sold tickets, helped local promoters cover guarantees and even co-promoted shows, giving Richmond’s growing music scene another place to organize.
“We participated in that a good bit in those early years by helping the bands, helping some of the guys that wanted to do a show, just put down the guarantee, and we sold the tickets, so we were kind of co-promoters,” Bland said. “Some of the stuff I really did promote ourselves, but others I just helped them make it happen. We got our money back, sold the tickets and helped out the shows.”
Back then, Carytown looked nothing like it does today.
“It was a lot sketchier,” Bland said. “There were only a handful of retailers. Rostov’s had just opened a little before us. There was Elman’s, the hardware store and a dancewear shop. There was a small amount of retail, and it wasn’t down this whole nine blocks. A lot of the buildings were just painted over or blacked out. They weren’t really storefronts. They were used for storage.”
Plan 9 arrived before Carytown became one of Richmond’s best-known shopping districts. The neighborhood was still finding its identity and as new businesses slowly opened and more people discovered the district, the record store grew alongside it, becoming one of the constants in a neighborhood that would eventually transform around it.
As the music business evolved through vinyl, cassettes and CDs, Plan 9 evolved with it, eventually expanding into multiple stores across Virginia.
For Bland, those early format changes weren’t a threat but were simply part of running a record store. “The transitions from vinyl to CD were easy enough because you still had formats and you still had customers buying physical goods,” he said. “At one time we had all three.”
“You ordered CDs, LPs and cassettes, and that was a pain in the ass just because you had multiple formats for one release,” Bland said. “You’d think, ‘Okay, how many Dave Matthews do we bring in? How many Springsteen?’ It was just having to make the right call.”
For years, that balancing act worked, then the internet changed everything.
Bland had navigated every format change the music industry could throw at him, but digital piracy and streaming were different. Customers weren’t switching from one physical format to another, many just stopped buying music altogether.
“The first wave was Napster and people pulling stuff down for free, and that hurt businesses across the board,” Bland said. As streaming took hold, the impact became impossible to ignore.
“Probably the worst time was when we had expanded into multiple stores and streaming hit,” he said. “Our stores were college-focused, young-person focused. We started closing stores and going through all of that. That was the most difficult time we ever had.”
“Both the economy and streaming was the perfect storm to kill off record stores,” Bland said. “I knew a lot of people across the board that either closed all their stores or lost one or two of their stores and had to downsize.”
Plan 9 wasn’t spared as stores in Williamsburg, Harrisonburg and other markets closed as Bland retrenched. The company shut down its warehouse operation and eventually sold the building to Hardywood Park Craft Brewery as the young brewery was beginning its own expansion. The larger Carytown store also became too expensive to justify.
The warehouse sale gave Plan 9 breathing room. Bland found a smaller warehouse, waited until new tenants took over the oversized Carytown location, and in December 2012 moved the flagship store across the street into the space it occupies today.
“They bought the building, so that got me out of there and gave us a little time to sort ourselves out, find another small place to use for storage… We were fortunate enough to find this place right across the street.”
“There was a time there I thought we might just end up being a used record and CD market,” Bland said. “I didn’t know what our future held, but we were still holding on.”
Then something unexpected happened, vinyl came back.
“Absolutely not,” Bland said when asked if he ever imagined records would become popular again. “No clue. I don’t know any one of my friends in the music business who really thought that would happen.”
The comeback didn’t happen overnight. Independent artists kept pressing records long after most of the industry had moved on, and the launch of Record Store Day in 2008 helped bring new attention to independent record stores. But about a decade ago, the revival reached a tipping point as younger listeners embraced vinyl not as nostalgia, but as a different way to experience music.
“We were sort of fearful of, ‘Hey, where are we headed now?'” Bland said. “There were hardly any records being pressed except for some real indies and some who just felt like they still wanted to do it. Then the youth of the time caught on, and of course it’s been growing now for 15 years.”
“I think they got back to, ‘Okay, I need something analog.’ They got into watches and old cameras, but most especially got into having records again. You missed having great images on the covers, the liner notes that you could read easily. All of that stuff that was great about records. Just taking it out that first time, putting the needle down and listening to something was really special. That really seemed to catch on. It made us successful again when we were just about on the verge of going out of business,” Bland said.
Today’s Plan 9 reflects that revival. Listening parties for new albums regularly fill the store before records officially hit streaming services. Fans gather to hear new releases together, browse the bins, swap stories and share an experience that can’t be replicated by an algorithm.
Bland believes that’s part of why people continue coming back and he has watched listening parties become destinations in their own right. “They’re all there together listening to something they love, and that is a social thing as well,” Bland said. “It’s a different version of going to a live concert. They can have the experience with a group instead of just streaming something by yourself on your headphones.”
That sense of community has always been central to Plan 9’s identity. “I think to be a good business, you give back to your community that supports you,” Bland said. “We do that by doing sales and special events for our customers, but the other thing is giving our local bands a shot at making it better and surviving when they play. We’ve always carried the records, we’ve always put up your posters… it’s just an extension of being supportive of the people who support us.”
Over the decades, that philosophy has produced countless memorable moments.
One of the most famous came in 1992, when No Doubt squeezed into Plan 9’s Carytown store for an in-store performance. “We had that on the docket, and then they were just blowing up,” Bland said. “We didn’t expect that, but they honored that commitment, and they came.”
The crowd packed the store while local radio stations broadcast live from both the front and back of the building. “We had one of the local radio stations parked out front with their live thing, and we had another one in the back of the store,” Bland recalled. “They were all trying to cover it as well, which was great for us.”
Plan 9 has hosted signings with the Ramones and countless in-store performances over the years. For its 20th anniversary, the store turned its parking lot into a daylong celebration featuring Richmond favorites Sparklehorse, Denali, the Mommies and a solo performance by Dave Lowery of Cracker, with music spread across stages inside and outside the store.
“That was probably the most memorable for me,” Bland said.
Looking back, if you ask Bland why he’s stayed with it for 45 years, the answer has very little to do with business. “I’m fortunate to be able to be involved in what I like,” he said. “To be able to make a reasonable living and be doing exactly what you loved, that was great. I never got tired of it.”
“I still take way too much home,” Bland laughed. “I’m like, ‘I have to have this. I should have this.'” Lately, he’s become especially interested in collecting Richmond records, preserving the music made in his own backyard alongside the store that has championed it for decades.
One day, he’d like to share that collection with everyone else. “I just want to have a display of all these records,” he said. “Come see if you can find a record you were on… back in your day.”
In the end, Plan 9 wasn’t built by someone chasing the music business. It was built by someone who simply loved music enough to spend a lifetime surrounded by it, sharing that love with anyone willing to walk through the front door.
Forty-five years later, Jim Bland is still doing exactly that.
Main image: Jim Bland, photo by R. Anthony Harris
Plan 9 45th Anniversary Benefit Show
Plan 9 Music will celebrate its 45th anniversary with a benefit show for WRIR 97.3FM on Saturday, July 25, from 3 to 10 p.m.at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery (2410 Ownby Lane). Featuring Beex + L’Amour, The Good Guys, Janet Martin & Elizabeth Wise, The Sky Chiefs, The Tom & Marty Band, Orthotonics, Brandon Wayne and His Lonesome Drifters, Ant the Symbol, and Rodney Stith and the Soul Foundation.
Admission is $9 or pay what you can, with proceeds benefiting WRIR 97.3 FM. Plan 9 is also inviting former employees to attend as part of the anniversary festivities.
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