In August 2020, Jesse Lee Jones, the owner of Robert's Western World (located directly across the street from Ernest Tubb's), bought the building and the record shop business from his long-time friend David McCormick for $4.75 million. This purchase allowed him to control two significant pieces of real estate that, as he noted in 2020, "protect, promote and preserve [the] great history [of traditional country music]."... The recent real estate boom has made significant news and waves in Music City and has been seismic on Broadway. For example, just three blocks away from Ernest Tubb's[,] country star John Rich sold and his investment partners sold the "Cotton Eyed Joe's" property at 200 Broadway to an undisclosed buyer for $24.5 million in 2021 -- a 32% profit after Rich and Atlanta-based The Ardent Cos. bought the building in 2019 for $18.5 million.
... "Preserving the history and tradition of country music remains at the forefront of everything we do," continues the Facebook statement by Honky Tonk Circus, ETRS, and David McCormick Company. "We remain committed to preservation work and look forward to new projects that will allow us to continue to protect and nurture the invaluable history and tradition of country music."
It could be that people will join together, buy the building, and enable the business to stay in operation.
That's what happened with the Drama Book Shop in New York City.
Focusing on the theater field, a large part of the store's revenue came from the sales of playscripts, and it was a significant resource for writers.
After the announcement of its closure, a number of playwrights came together including Lin-Manuel Miranda, to buy the store to keep it in operation ("Drama Book Shop Sets a Fresh Start in a New Locale," New York Times).
We don't think about it so much, especially planners, but record stores, music instrument stores, practice facilities, bookstores, music score stores (there used to be one in Silver Spring, Maryland), art supply stores, and of course for profit concert facilities, ranging in size from bars to much larger facilities, etc. are part of the cultural-arts ecosystem, but because they are for profit, their place in the arts ecosystem is usually ignored in culture master planning.
And just as I argue that there needs to be facilities planning by discipline, and scenario planning and a response system developed for when arts institutions are threatened with closure, the same goes for arts-related retail.
This is just another example. Probably, to come up with the amount of money the owners want, philanthropy would have to step in, because the business case for the record store doesn't justify the asking price for the building.
-- "Cultural plans should have an element on culture-related retail," 2018
-- "Newsstands closing in San Diego and Seattle: revisiting cultural retail planning for books and periodicals," 2019
Although Nashville is full of people in the profession who have the means and connections to save the Tubb Record Shop.
But it would be a lot easier if cultural master planning prepared communities for such action. Paris' SEMAEST community development corporation's retail preservation initiative is the world's best practice example of how to do this in terms of both buildings and businesses:
-- "The SEMAEST Vital Quartier program remains the best model for helping independent retail," 2018
Note that Nashville already has the music cultural heritage preservation issue wrt music studios:
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music," 2017
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