Inside The Downtown Sound, Greeley’s sole record shop and the quiet heart of a growing music scene.
There is a particular kind of quiet inside a record store. Not silence, exactly. Something softer. The low hum of a turntable warming up, the papery shuffle of fingers walking through a crate, friendly neighborhood chatter between the regulars. At The Downtown Sound, that quiet has a name: community.
Tucked into Downtown Greeley, just across the parking lot from the Moxi Theater, The Downtown Sound is the sole record shop serving the town. For a lot of people here, it is more than that. It is a stop on the weekly route. A place to land. Somewhere to be someone among other people who love music in the same way.
“It’s not just a building with a bunch of wax and metal in it,” says Ben Jankow, who runs the shop alongside his family. “It’s a collection of community and memories and hopefully all of the good feelings that come with that.”
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Records run deep in the Jankow family. Ben’s dad, John, has been a music nerd since childhood, the kind of kid who collected film soundtracks and played them over and over until the music carried him somewhere else. His mom, Jennie, grew up loving music too. Both of them were kids of the 80s. A lot of that love landed squarely on Ben.
The store itself has a longer history. It was originally opened by Ed and Veronica Roth in Loveland around 2013, run as a family operation with their daughter. It changed hands once, briefly merged with an instrument business, then came back around. In 2021, the Roths put out a quiet feeler on Facebook. They were looking for someone to take the shop and care for it.
The Jankows answered. Ben still remembers the night his parents came down to the basement, where he was playing a game with friends, and casually announced they might own a record store soon. Sure enough, they did.
They ran the Loveland location for a couple of years. Their last day there came a few days before Christmas in 2023. They packed the whole thing up, cleaned it out, and a few weeks later opened fresh in Downtown Greeley. The move brought one more important addition: business partner Dave Chapinski, a collector of more than fifty years who has spent a career restoring equipment and pricing records in shops like this one.
Today the shop is John, Jennie, Ben, and Dave, with Ben’s cousin Caden Crowet handling much of the behind-the-scenes work and younger siblings popping in to help. “When we go about treating each other and our customers like family,” Dave says, “then that’s what we are. That’s who we are. Family.”
THE SOUNDTRACK OF LIFE
Ask Ben why people keep coming back to vinyl in the age of streaming, and he answers like someone who has thought about it for years. Because he has. He grew up on the cusp of the digital age, with CDs and DVDs giving way to iPods and endless libraries. Convenient, sure. But something was missing.
Dave puts it plainly. “We know why this is important,” he says. “That’s what a collection is. It’s the soundtrack of your life.”
There is an archival truth in it too. Not everything made it to streaming. Some genuinely great art lives only on physical media, in liner notes and cover art and an artist’s intention you can hold in your hands. A record collection, Dave says, is too special to die in a landfill.
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
Some customers come in with a specific album in mind, a name from a want list they have carried for decades. The best moments, Ben says, are when someone finally finds it. “I have been searching for this for 20 years,” they tell him, “and I just found it in your store.”
Others come in looking for nothing at all. “Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Dave says, “and then you find it.” They thumb through the crates and let the cover art or a single song lead them somewhere new.
What they all find is a place that sits close to the music itself. The shop is a block away from the Moxi Theater, where Friday Fest fills the summer, and just down the street from the Union Colony Civic Center. A dedicated local section carries Greeley artists like The Burroughs and High Lonesome. “Greeley has a real, feasible, tight music scene that is growing more and more,” Ben says, “and people will miss out if they aren’t checking out the shows and music happening down here.”
WHAT YOU’LL FIND AT DOWNTOWN SOUND
Vinyl is the heart of it, new and used, every genre they can stock, with rarer collector’s pressings for the serious diggers. They also carry CDs, cassettes, and 8-tracks, plus a wall of gear: turntables, speakers, and the occasional cassette or CD player. They repair equipment too, so a beloved setup can keep spinning. Lately the shop has hosted listening parties, often with giveaways and a limited-edition item for one lucky customer, and it serves as a venue for Record Store Day twice a year.
A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE DANCE
What you find at The Downtown Sound is not really wax and paper. It is memory, made physical. A record is something you can hold in your hands and something you can connect with. You remember who handed it to you. You remember the store where you found it, the friend who told you that you had to hear it, the season of your life it belongs to.
That is what a streaming file cannot hold. No matter how large the library, it cannot tell you where you were when the music first arrived.
Ben has spent a lot of time turning this over, and he keeps landing in the same place. Each record pulls in two directions at once. It reaches outward, toward the people and the moments woven into it. And it turns inward, toward a quiet only the listener knows.
“Whenever you listen to these records,” he says, “it jogs your memory of these moments of connection that you had with the outside world. And then you can recluse into the music at the same time. It’s kind of like a beautiful little dance.”
Maybe that is the whole thing. A record store is a room where that dance keeps happening, again and again, one needle drop at a time. Visit the Downtown Sound at 819 10th St. Greeley, CO.
Special thanks to Arely, LindyHop, Dave, and the Jankow family for their assistance in gathering materials and information for this feature.
