"It's going to be a full-service, comprehensive dispensary for the neighborhood," Weinstein says.

But it hasn’t been cheap to enter the medical marijuana industry. Amoeba Music has already paid approximately $100,000 just for applying for the license to sell -- it didn't help that they were denied a license back in May -- and converting the space into a dispensary is expected to cost them several hundred thousand more.

Also, despite the almost-guaranteed profitability of medical marijuana, entering the business for the Amoeba owners is still risky after spending about $5 million on an online digital music store that never came to fruition. Weinstein says the project, which they saw as potentially competing with iTunes and Amazon in terms of the range and amount of downloadable music it would provide, "almost killed" Amoeba and had to be scrapped because they couldn't strike a licensing deal with the major labels. Also, by the time the store was ready, Weinstein says the market for music downloads had come and went.

"The whole market only lasted nine years from beginning to end! Nobody buys digital downloads any more," Weinstein says. "We literally never had any chance to get footing in that market. We spent millions of dollars on it and lots of resources, and where did it go? Into thin air."

Besides being financially hobbled by an expensive gamble, Amoeba has the challenge of sustaining a business model that is contradictory to what is working for newer record stores. Local chains like 1-2-3-4-Go! and Stranded appear to be thriving because they're in smaller locations and are smaller-staffed than the larger-sized Amoebas -- Weinstein says that the L.A. store alone costs $165,000 a month in rent and employs over 200 workers. Not to say Amoeba's emporiums are completely doomed, since plenty of customers still regularly shop at all three locations.

"We feel that the market for hard copies (of music releases) is going to stay strong for years to come, but it may not be big enough to sustain all of our three big stores," Weinstein says. "We want to keep an emporium for hard copies in each of the three communities that we care about so much."

If the dispensary succeeds in keeping the Berkeley store afloat, Weinstein says that the other two locations will end up incorporating marijuana dispensaries. (The San Francisco store already has a medical marijuana evaluation office in its upstairs.) But Weinstein says it's not just because of the money; he and Prinz strongly support the medical marijuana business in general.

"Cannabis dispensaries are our first experiment in this business -- a business we strongly believe in. We think access to cannabis is a human rights issue, and my partner Dave and I are both very much on the same page," Weinstein says. "We're being afforded an opportunity to come into this business with fresh eyes and come up with a new model on Telegraph. We feel the responsibility and we're hoping to make everyone happy with a model that is strictly Berkeley-style and very much a part of the community."