Much-loved store in the city’s Kala Ghoda district to close for good at the end of February with owners blaming online shopping for the decline in sales

Mumbai’s leafy Kala Ghoda district, a hub for art galleries and bohemian cafes, is set to lose one of its landmark attractions at the end of February: the historic and beloved music store, Rhythm House.

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With music consumption an increasingly online experience, sales at Rhythm House, which has been around for seven decades, have been declining and its owners recently admitted defeat and made the decision to close down.

“It has been on the cards for some time,” says Mehmood Curmally, who owns and runs the store as its managing director, while his uncle, Amir Curmally, is the chairman. “Online sales of music, be it digital, streaming or physical sales through e-commerce, mean our sales are going to keep going down.”

The store started out in the early 1940s, set up by a Curmally family friend, before Mehmood’s father took over the business, and eventually passed it on to his brother, Amir, and Mehmood.

In its early days, the shop sold imported 78rpm records. As the years went on, the family saw various mediums of recorded music come and go, as it sold jukeboxes, vinyl, then cassettes, before stocking the CDs and DVDs the shop sells today.

There’s nothing like the experience of going to a record shop and browsing Noshir Gobhai, Rhythm House customer

“We specialised more in imported western music at first and when the Indian companies came in and started manufacturing Indian records, of course we started stocking that as well,” says Mehmood. In recent years, the shop has offered a variety of styles from Indian classical music and Bollywood hits to jazz and the latest pop albums by the likes of Justin Bieber.

Rhythm House has attracted a loyal following of regular customers over the decades. Noshir Gobhai, a photographer in Mumbai, is one of them. A lover of western classical music in particular, as well as jazz and classic rock, he is now 65 and has been buying music from the store since he was 16. He says he felt “terrible” when he heard the news Rhythm House was closing down and has bought dozens of CDs from the shop “in a frenzy” since then to add to his collection of almost 4,000 discs – almost all of which have been purchased from Rhythm House.

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“There’s nothing like the experience of going to a record shop and browsing and maybe deciding to buy something,” says Gobhai.

Just as music stores have been on the decline, in countries including the UK and the US, India has suffered a similar fate, and many of Mumbai’s record shops have closed down.

“We’re probably the last people still standing,” says Mehmood. “There are a few smaller shops still operating, but as far as bigger stores go they’ve more or less all closed or converted to other things.”