Henry Stone Talks One-Stop Record Shops, Record Labels, and Jukebox Operators

Martin “Mike” Spector owned the Spec’s Record chain of 75 stores throughout Florida. In 1988 Rolling Stone Magazine congratulated Spector on his 40th anniversary in business.

“Bush Distributing is where Ozzy worked and that’s where Budisco had its office. Bush distributed jukeboxes, the Wurlitzer, or Rockola, the machines, and then they had their little one-stop for selling records.

You could get all your records in one place at the one-stop. I was the one who sold them those records. That came later on with Shapiro, Raoul Shapiro. Actually Eddie Shaw was his son. Eddie was my engineer for the Ray Charles sessions. Raoul Shapiro had Budisco, which ended up being a pretty big one-stop. That’s when I stopped selling to jukebox operators direct, cause then the business started to grow. When that happened they came in all over the country, and they still have a few left even today. They sold all the labels, so if you had a small record store you could make one-stop and buy all your music.

If you were a big enough record store like Spec’s, you would buy direct from the distributor. Mike Spector owned all the Spec’s Record Stores, and in fact, I owned a one-stop with Mike Spector that sold everything.

See, as a distributor I only carried the lines of records from labels that I represented, like Warner Brothers, Atlantic, Stax, Motown, dadadadada on and on. But then there was also RCA, Columbia, Decca, etc., and they’d all go and sell to the one-stops. It was a record store for record stores, not for consumers. They were the middle man. It went from the record label to the distributor to the one-stop to the stores. Some stores skipped the one-stops and went straight to the distributors. The one-stops were like the aggregators. They would take records from all the different labels so that the smaller stores that couldn’t maybe do enough volume to buy direct from Henry could pay a couple pennies more and buy exactly what they needed like two or three of a number at a time.”

• From a 2013 interview with Henry Stone. ©Jacob Katel and ©HenryStoneMusic USA Inc. All Rights Reserved