“This [event] has really brought a lot of people back into the stores, both for new releases as well as the old stuff,” said Jim Bland, owner of Plan 9 Music, which has been a Carytown fixture since 1981.

At one time, Bland had 10 record stores in Virginia and North Carolina. Now, he has two — the Carytown spot and one in Charlottesville, which remained after a 2011 bankruptcy reorganization.

“What changed for us since 2000 is both the economy and then post-Napster,” Bland said.

Napster, which began as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service in 1999, was the start of legitimate and illegitimate digital downloading. By then, vinyl had been displaced by cassettes and then CDs, but those formats — though more portable than records — were still physical products that brought customers into record stores.

“Nothing is like it used to be,” said Bill Kennedy, owner of BK Music in the Stratford Hills Shopping Center in South Richmond.

From that same era, a new CD by a prominent artist such as rapper Lil Wayne would still fly off the shelves, selling 300 or 400 copies a week at the store, he said.