Our first business was called Main Street Music. My husband and I opened our store in our hometown May 1999. After a year of online research and planning I opened with much success! Our kids were in high school so this was a perfect family business. We offered all sorts of music for our small town. Main Street Music offered Karoke nights, live bands, sponsored events, and sold guitars in our little store.
Shortly after we opened, all my favorite customers would come in and show me their collection of “burned cds”. Many local cd stores closed including ours shortly after Napster caught on. Our supplier went online and so did Main Street Music. We closed the shop in August 2001 and December 2001 our first customer downloaded a song on mainstreetmusic.com website. As our website grew attention all over the US we added to our database, shopping cart and bought our own server. Mainstreetmusic.com started many ads using Google Ads and the traffic crashed our website so another server was bought. December 2002 we had 600,000 visits.
I was the only customer service rep during this time. I had a blast talking with soldiers trying to find karaoke music, artists trying to get noticed by record companies, and many Countries looking for music. Lots of our customers were trying to figure out how to download music at that time. Mainstreetmusic.com was ready to expand in January 2003 when Walmart bought our supplier. Since we had such a great deal with our supplier we were not able to afford another supplier. So we closed Mainstreetmusic.com for the last time.
Our lesson from mainstreetmusic.com would be not to rely on someone else for your products. It can be taken away within minutes of your dream. This really fun experience gave us our next step to where we are now. Ovaleye.com owned and operated by our family and all of our servers and products are OURS!
Follow your dream!
