Vertigo Vinyl traded jump scares for Florence Welsh’s haunting vocals this Halloween, kicking off the holiday with a listening party on the day that Florence + The Machine released its new album, “Everybody Scream,” on Oct. 31. The shop regularly hosts listening parties for a variety of artists, as it did last week for the popular indie rock band from London. The album blared through the store’s speakers while attendees discussed their favorite songs.
Noah Silver ‘26, a Macon native, is the owner of the record shop in Mercer Village, where Linden Avenue and Coleman Avenue meet. Each listener – of which there were only a handful on the afternoon of Halloween – left the shop with a poster and tote bag, which would typically come with the purchase of an album, but since Silver “didn’t even have time to post the event,” he rewarded guests with these items for free.
Listeners milled around Vertigo Vinyl, browsing through the records and bobbing their heads to music as the sounds of employees packing orders echoed through the wall.
About $2.6 million of the store’s sales come from online orders, according to Silver, versus the roughly $73,000 of in-store revenue from 2025 alone. These earnings recently allowed Silver to double his staff from two employees to four. The team is made up of packers, customer service and orders specialists.
William Dantzler, one of the owners of Fresh Produce Records in downtown Macon, said that Fresh Produce mostly focuses on in-store operations, in contrast to Vertigo’s expansive online operations. Recently, Fresh Produce expanded its reach in Macon with a new, larger location on Cherry Street.
“I think we sort of cater to different groups of people,” Dantzler said, who mentioned he views Vertigo Vinyl as a peer rather than competitor. “We just want to service our customers and make sure everybody gets what they want.”
Silver said he has been able to collaborate with major artists as they promote their new music as early as possible. The business model is paying off for the English major.
“I sold this Frank Ocean vinyl and it brought it like $50,000 in like ten minutes. I bought a car with that," in June 2022, the first month the record store opened, Silver said. "That was kind of absurd.”
Most of the store’s customers hear about Vertigo Vinyl online and sometimes drive to Macon from larger cities like Atlanta, according to Silver.
“We did one for Twenty One Pilots a couple months ago that actually filled the store to the brim and everyone couldn’t fit in,” Silver said. Over 200 people signed up to attend the listening party, packing in both the storefront and warehouse area, testing the store’s capacity. “I don’t think there’s ever been that many people in that building before.”
The venture has been the actualization of Silver’s high school dream, when he started selling records on eBay and Depop. Over time, Silver said he built up a reputation for having the records on people's radar and became, “one of the bigger store names in the country.” He added that his use of TikTok to promote his wares was a catalyst for his online sales.
“We knew Noah,” Dantzler said. “He had been coming into our shop for months, checking out what we were doing. I mean, we could tell he had something going, some plan of his own.”
Nearly three and a half years ago, that plan became a reality, but not without some minor hiccups. When, in the midst of his first semester at Mercer and a few months after the original physical store's opening in Mercer Village, the store’s sales volume forced Silver to upscale his shop and move to a larger space a few doors down, still in Mercer Village.
Silver said his favorite part of his job is working with independent artists who wouldn’t be able to fund their own releases. His goal is to keep the store in Macon as a “base of operations,” but hopes to franchise it and open locations elsewhere.
He recently worked with the singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger, one of his personal favorites, on a launch that generated $350,000.
“The whole thing kind of feels unreal,” Silver said. “I never really take enough time to let it sink in because I think that that would freak me out a little too much, so I kind of just focus on making sure everything doesn’t fall apart.”
