Local businessman Terry Woodward got his start in the record business sweeping up the floors and cleaning the windows of the Wax Works record store opened by his father, LeRoy Woodward in 1949.
He has navigated the business from the time of the 78 rpm record to the virtual streaming platforms of today.
One thing hasn’t change in that time, Woodward’s love of music and the business.
“I graduated from the University of Kentucky in December 1963 and went to work for Texas Instruments in Versailles, Kentucky,” Woodward said. “I worked there for about a year and decided I wanted to come back to Owensboro.”
After moving back to his hometown, Woodward worked as personnel manager at Owensboro Daviess County Hospital for a year before becoming a staff accountant for Modern Welding Company. At the same time, he was keeping the books for his father’s record store at night to earn a little extra money.
Eventually, Woodward’s father would ask him if he would come onboard with the business in a full-time capacity.
“I had some other brothers, but I was the only one really available,” Woodward said.
The year was 1968, and a new way of listening to music called the 8-track tape was about to make the record business pop, at least for a period of time.
“My timing was pretty good, because when I started was when 8-track tapes came out,” he said. “Well, 8-track tapes revolutionized the music business for a while because that was the first time you could actually play music in a car.”
Woodward recalled that some automobile companies tried putting turntables in cars so people could play their vinyl records while motoring down the road, but bumps in the road made the needle jump, and it just didn’t work out. The 8-track would change all of that.
As the 8-track boom hit the United States, the concept of the indoor shopping mall was also beginning to sweep the nation, and Woodward saw an opportunity to launch a new chain of record stores.
“I decided to start a record chain called Disc Jockey, and that was 1978,” Woodward said.
The first Disc Jockey Store was located in Owensboro’s Towne Square Mall.
“I started this chain in 1978, and I ended up with 240 retail stores in 37 different states,” Woodward said. “Of course, there were some ups and downs in the industry.”
Woodward recalled having to explain to customers that if a new album was skipping on their turntable, that it was probably time for them to purchase a new needle.
“You would have to educate then and say I can give you another record, but it will do the same thing; you need a new needle,” he said. “We would have a machine you could look at and see how blunt it was.”
It was service above and beyond what the big box stores could offer, Woodward said.
Then as time marched on and Compact Discs became the new desired music format, larger stores began utilizing them as a loss leader, pricing them at cost or even a loss to get customers in the door. It was a situation a smaller business could not hope to compete with.
“We had to contend with that at one point in time, then the record companies realized what was going on,” Woodward said. “So they put in what is called Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP) to level the playing field.”
While the record companies could not tell a retailer how much to sell a CD for, they could tell them what to sell it for if they hoped to receive any advertising dollars.
“So they had to kind of raise their prices and so forth, so it became a level playing field again,” he said.
With his Disc Jockey record store chain booming, Woodward said he turned his attention to videos in the early 1980s after the invention of the VCR, adding a branch of the business titled Video Works.
As a distributor to the major Hollywood studios, Video Works would distribute videos to about 5,000 of the roughly 29,000 video stores in the United States at that time.
“They were trying to sell movies which didn’t work because people just were not going to pay $40-50 dollars for a movie,” he said. “When rental started and then that made sense because somebody would pay $3 to rent one overnight. The business just exploded.”
While Woodward would build up the Wax Works/Video Works business to include 240 Disc Jockey retail stores, 5,000 video stores to service and about 1,500 employees, eventually the business changed with the invention of the internet and streaming services.
“The record companies decided to do away with MAP pricing, and I knew when they did that that was the end of retail because you just couldn’t compete. You couldn’t pay mall rent and be competitive,” he said.
Woodward said he was fortunate to be able to sell his Disc Jockey chain to one of his competitors in October 1999.
“I was the last record chain that sold, everybody else went belly up,” he said. “I hated it because the music business is what I grew up with.”
Now 84, Woodward is still active in the business, coming into the Wax Works/Video Works offices in downtown Owensboro almost daily.
These days the business consists of a sports division dealing in the distribution of sporting games and other sports related programming. The company also handles the distribution for other programs, such as “The Rifleman.”
“Our business model today is there is very little brick and mortar left,” Woodward said. “There are some museums that we sell to, some libraries; the only retail stores we sell to are Hallmark franchise stores.”
The company also sells its video titles on Amazon and does order fulfillment for Walmart.com.
Past an age when most men opt to retire, perhaps spending their days teeing off at a golf course, Woodward said that lifestyle is just not for him.
“First of all, I don’t play golf well enough to retire and to me, this is not work,” he said. “I enjoy the business, have always enjoyed the business and it gives me something
to do.”
