from paste: Best Place to Find Cool Bumper Stickers for the Outside of Your Car, and CDs for the Inside - At a time when indie record stores were dropping off the map, John Timmons decided he needed to move into a building big enough to need its own map. Ear X-tacy grew from the 500-square-foot store it was in 1985 into the 10,000-square-foot music wonderland it is today. With countless listening stations and riveting in-store performances, the shop puts a high premium on musical discovery.

Here's the full list:
Amoeba Records, Los Angeles, CA
Criminal Records, Atlanta, GA
Other Music, New York City
Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, Clarksdale, MS
Waterloo Records, Austin, TX
Aquarius Records, San Francisco, CA
Dusty Groove America, Chicago, IL
Ernest Tubb Record Shop, Nashville, TN
Shangri-La Records, Memphis, TN
Music Millennium, Portland, OR
Ear X-Tacy, Louisville, KY
Louisiana Music Factory, New Orleans, LA
Newbury Comics, Boston, MA
Grimey's New + Pre-Loved Music, Nashville, TN
Turntable Lab, New York City
The Electric Fetus, Minneapolis, MN
Jerry's Records, Pittsburgh, PA

paste magazine is giving louisville love in this month's issue. "my morning jacket" is on the cover (personally, i still don't get the big deal about these guys), and ear x-tacy is listed in another article as one of "the 17 coolest record stores in america."

i'm kind of surprised that cinci's "shake it" didn't make the list, imho, it should have...


congrats! nice to see them get the well deserved recognition. glad it's (literally) in my neighborhood, it's a helluva great store,.

I wonder why....do you know, Bill....the *17* is significant ? Seems odd. Top 10, Top 20....17 ? I'm probably missing sumpin'

Awesome that two on the list are in Nashville, but one only sells country so it's kind of a non-entity to me. Grimey's is pretty awesome though.

I don't know why The Great Escape didn't make the list, either. As far as I'm concerned, Great Escape and Grimey's are the two best music stores in Nash-Vegas.

i think all of the stores listed are primarily "new" inventory stores, "great escape" (there is one here in louisville too, but it's not anywhere close to as good as the one in nashville) is only used. + it's as much used books, dvd and i think more new/used comics as a "music" store. but they do have one hulluva selection of used music.

while "ernest tubb's" is cool for historical reasons, to me, it's not that impressive as a store. i find it to be as much a tourist attraction as an actual, functional record store. plus, as steve mentioned, it's pretty much exclusively country and i've never found their staff to be very engaging or helpful. but, i did pick up my damn fine CASH t-shirt there. all 'round, both "shake it" and "everybody's" in cincinnati are far superior stores.