If you had no plan to buy something, you thumbed through the racks, hoping for a surprise. The rabbit hole of its day, Tower Records was a place to get lost and find something. Before YouTube, the music streaming out of the encyclopedic record store on Route 17 in Paramus opened minds, shaped styles and influenced tastes.

Even as records morphed into CDs, Tower Records drew people looking to be stirred by sound. Walking through the red-framed entrance in the early 1990s to get a copy of R.E.M.’s Monster was Bergenfield native and four-time Grammy winner Jack Antonoff. Antonoff, who lived about 10 minutes away, says that “You could just trust stuff” on the shelves.

“I’d go there with my parents and they’d be like, ‘You get two CDs,’” he told Billboard in 2014. “It was a really incredible time. There was so much mystery, these things just popping out — Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all these great bands.”

Akin to today’s eclectic curators of Spotify playlists, the buyers for Tower Records stores had liberty to select the records, cassette tapes and CDs that would hit the slanted racks.

From country to rock, employees were assigned to buy music to stock their particular sections, so they had to know local tastes; for example, in New Jersey, there would be a lot more Springsteen titles available. Selections were made to bring people in and keep them coming back. The concept was real-life Pandora — if you like this song, then you’ll probably like this other one. The transmission, however, was social, gradual and often more informative. Turntables on hip-high shelves let patrons sample music, as long as they were willing to share an earphone with a friend.

Tower Records was always about curation. At 16, founder Russ Solomon cobbled together a vast inventory in the back of his Sacramento, Calif., shop, Tower Drugstore. The “deep catalog” strategy would keep even hyper-focused genre divers intrigued.

The strategy worked at scale because Tower Records buyers had the ability to take risks, while buying at deep discount. The buyers were so influential — shaping sales charts through their selections — and the company so ubiquitous that Tower Records was permitted to return as much as 20 percent of its unsold records.

Tower had everything. It was everywhere.

At its height, Solomon’s yellow-and-red empire had nearly 200 stores around the world. There’s still one in Tokyo.

Before it closed in 2006, the Paramus store was a magnet for music fans seeking new records, deep cuts, and wristbands that gave them a chance to buy concert tickets. Patrons packed the narrow aisles, peering behind white plastic dividers to find gems amid a thin forest of red load-bearing poles. Bright, bold banners declared sales beyond the full-length storefront glass.

The Ramones, the Misfits, Anthrax and Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and The Sopranos signed autographs there. Locally-based bands such as Dream Theater and Dog Eat Dog performed at the store.

Director Ernest Dickerson, former New York Yankee Willie Randolph and Gordon Willis, the cinematographer who shot The Godfather, browsed the video section.

During the CD boom of the 1990s, Tower Records may have trusted its ability to draw customers too much. The company doubled down after the advent of the MP3 and sold a nine-figure bond in 1998 to support its global dominance. In 1999, the music-sharing program Napster debuted online and transmitted Tower Records’ product for free to homes worldwide.

Tower held on until 2006, when it declared bankruptcy. The chain had amassed too much debt in a race for global expansion amid the continuing rise of digital downloads. The Paramus store fell along with it. Today, the building retains its shape, but its red hue is tinted blue. It serves as a Goodwill store.

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Life after Tower Records

The 2008 Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, used the former Tower Records building in Paramus as one of its filming locations. The movie, which starred Brad Pitt, George Clooney, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand, turned the vacant record store into Hardbodies Gym.

In 2015, Colin Hanks directed All Things Must Pass, a documentary covering the rise and fall of Tower Records and its founder, Russ Solomon.