Time Traveler Records, one of Northeast Ohio’s longest-running independent record stores, is spinning again at a new Akron home, having reopened at 1375 N. Portage Path after 12 years at its previous location on West Market Street. The store reopened Aug. 8 and sells new and used vinyl, CDs, cassettes, imported releases and rare collector finds, and owner Scott Shepard also buys and trades records from customers.
The reopening keeps alive a business that has now lasted 46 years, outlasting the CD era, the download era and the streaming revolution that hollowed out record retail across the country. Shepard has said the store’s survival comes down to the hands-on experience of flipping through bins and talking music with people who care about it, something an algorithm does not replicate.
Shepard’s path into the business started with his own shelves. Before opening his own shop, he worked at a variety of record stores, including Camelot Music, and in 1980, at age 26, he opened 4711 Records at 4711 Akron Peninsula Road, naming the shop for its address because he believed it would be easier for customers to find. The store doubled as his home in those early years.
“I’ve always been into collecting,” Shepard says. “And originally the reason I started was to increase my own collection. I never thought it was going to be my life’s work, but that’s how it ended up.” The store moved several times over the following years, and those moves eventually gave the business the name it carries today.
In the early 1990s Shepard renamed the shop Title Wave, but a letter from a Minneapolis lawyer representing a chain with the same name forced another change. Wanting to stay in roughly the same spot in the phone book, he looked for a name starting with the same letters and landed on how listening to music has always felt to him. “To me, listening to music has always felt like time traveling,” he says, and Time Traveler Records was born.
The name has lasted through several moves since, including the most recent jump from 118 W. Market St. to the Portage Path address. The new location puts the store in one of Akron’s most traveled retail and residential corridors, minutes from Stan Hywet Hall and the neighborhoods that have supplied its customers for decades.
For Akron music lovers, the takeaway is simple: the bins are open again. Time Traveler Records is receiving customers at 1375 N. Portage Path, buying and trading as well as selling, and a business that began as one collector’s excuse to collect more has entered its next era in a new home.