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Princeton Record Exchange
PRINCETON, NJ • 20 S Tulane St, Princeton, NJ 08542
“The Record Exchange saved my life," James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem
Princeton feels like an unlikely town to host a store with over 100,000 titles in stock; it’s a suburban, Ivy League, genteel kind of place, not a rollicking metropolis. But, since 1980, PREX has been a destination for music lovers—and the kind of small-town kids who go on to start legendary bands.
PREX was founded in 1980 by Barry Weisfeld, who’d spent the previous five years selling records out of the back of a Chevy van at flea markets and college campuses from Dartmouth to American University.
Weisfeld chose Princeton because it split the difference between New York and Philly, and because (this was in the aftermath of the '79 oil crisis) you could actually walk there. Longtime GM Jon Lambert bought the place from Weisfeld in 2015 and had the good sense not to change too much.
They buy thousands of records a month, which is why the bins never go stale no matter how many times you've dug through them, and the stock is so varied, it caters to all sorts of listeners, not to mention several generations of teens, including someone at ViV, who found their community there.
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