One of the last music stores in San Francisco is closing

A steady string of customers entered the Haight Ashbury Music Center on a sunny September morning, some of them traveling from afar to check the instruments on display. The yellow discount tags were a draw, but so, too, was the chance to express sadness and dismay at the impending loss of a cultural mainstay of San Francisco.

“This is absolutely sad,” said Jessica McKinnon, a musician visiting from Australia. “This is my first trip to the U.S., and I made sure when I was in San Francisco, I’d come here.”

Julio Matos, who was visiting from Los Angeles with his daughter Julia, bought an electric guitar, a blue Fender 66, that was on sale.

“As a musician, guitars or any instrument tend to speak to you when you put your hands on it,” he said. “These stores allow you to do that, and only then can the perfect instrument hit you like a bolt of lighting. It’s sad the store is closing.”

The two-story store, where guitars, accordions, pianos, fiddles, ukuleles, sheet music and audio gear are on sale, had almost made it to the half-century mark. Owner Massoud Badakhshan, 69, said the same things that have affected brick-and-mortar stores in other sectors — rising rents, slowing sales and online competition — prompted him to close the doors after 47 years.

“I haven’t paid myself in five years, that’s how bad store sales are,” said Badakhshan, who has owned the business for 40 years and moved it to its current location at 1540 Haight St. in 1984. “We’ve tried for many years to buy this property, and now, rent is not doable anymore.”

He said he pays $14,000 a month for rent for the 6,000-square-foot space that includes a basement. A spokeswoman at Canyon Pacific Management, the landlord’s representative, declined to comment. Badakhshan wouldn’t say how much the store makes. The website, haightashburymusic.com, will stay open after the store closes Oct. 27.

After that, fewer than 10 independent music stores — ones that sell musical instruments and offer music lessons — will dot the Bay Area, according to Badakhshan and another longtime music store owner, Kevin Jarvis. In their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, there were almost 70, veterans of the music retail scene say.

“Stores then were the only way to get your hands on sheet music and instruments,” said Cyrus Ginwala, director of San Francisco State University’s School of Music. “In our collection, we have instruments with imprints and stamps from music stores that no longer exist.”

Music stores also gave musicians a place to find work and connect with each other. “They served a small community with very specialized needs,” Ginwala said. Today, the Alliance of Independent Music Merchants, a trade group for the industry, counts 63 members in the U.S.

The first big challenge for smaller, independent stores came in the form of chain stores like Guitar Center. At its peak in the ’80s and ’90s, the chain counted more than 400 stores; last year, it reportedly flirted with bankruptcy, though it’s now opening stores again.

To answer the chain stores, Bay Area independent music stores formed the NorCal Music Coalition in the late ’90s, Badakhshan said. The group sought to order in volume from manufacturers to get the kind of discounts chain stores enjoyed.

“It was great while it lasted, but the group disbanded 10 years after it started,” said Jarvis, 69, the former owner of Redwood City’s Gelb Music, an institution that has been around for 80 years.

Jarvis said the group came apart after many of the stores closed because of retirements and deaths. Also, he said, it was tough “to operate uniformly with a lot of voices who were set in their ways.”

The second big challenge was the rise of online shopping. To compete, many stores established their own websites or sold through online marketplaces. But for Badakhshan, who tried all of that, it wasn’t enough.

In 2014, he bought Gelb Music from Jarvis, along with its building. He says investing in real estate protects merchants from rising rents. He plans to run Gelb’s store and online operations, consolidating the inventory left over from the Haight store.

The Music Center was first founded as Acoustic Music in 1972 by Rodney Albin. (He was the brother of Peter Albin, Janis Joplin’s bass player.) After a change of names and ownership, Badakhshan bought it in 1980 and gave it its current moniker.

The store became a hub for the Bay Area music scene. Carlos Santana, Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead, Cyndi Lauper and others would stop by for jam sessions.

For former neighborhood resident Ernesto Pena, the closing of the music store is bittersweet.

“They used to let me play my guitar for tips outside the store,” he said. “But we can’t carry on as if the hippie movement is still alive and well. We need to move on.”

Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @shwanika