DAYTONA BEACH — There are roughly 100,000 vinyl albums in the bins at Atlantic Sounds, the venerable record store just west of the bridge on International Speedway Boulevard, where expansion will soon make room for even more.
This week, the shop’s longtime owner, Mike Toole, expects to welcome customers to a new, additional satellite shop at 142 W. International Speedway Boulevard, two doors to the west from the main shop that has been a haven for music lovers for 43 years.
“We are simply out of room,” said Toole on a recent morning, chatting about the expansion between welcoming a steady stream of customers and fielding the occasional phone call at his cluttered workspace near the shop’s front door.
“There’s more records,” he said, putting down the phone after talking with a customer offering used vinyl to potentially sell the shop, a Daytona Beach fixture for 43 years.
“I’m really excited about it,” he said of the expansion, which will increase the shop’s existing 6,400 square feet by roughly 50%. “It’s fun to watch how it has developed, how it’s all falling into place.”
Daytona’s Brown & Brown Insurance now Atlantic Sounds’ landlord
In October 2024, Brown & Brown Insurance bought seven commercial buildings on the block, known as “Burgoyne Village,” including the main Atlantic Sounds store that had been owned by Toole.
In September, Toole signed a lease for the additional space, ensuring occupancy of both the original shop, at 138 W. International Speedway Boulevard, and the new addition through January 2027, he said.
Although specific details about an official opening date are still being finalized, the new shop is expected to welcome its first customers during a soft opening this week, Toole said.
On a recent afternoon, shop employees stocked bins with some of the 40,000 compact discs that will be the main attraction, along with a selection of posters, vinyl and cassettes.
Behind them, a doe-eyed Stevie Nicks poster kept watch, never blinking.
The singer was an eye-catching presence on a colorful wall display that included more posters ranging from Nirvana to actress Audrey Hepburn next to framed album covers representing Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, AC/DC and Green Day, among others.
Atlantic Sounds draws devoted customers seeking ‘that diamond’
The expansion is music to the ears of devoted longtime customers such as Scott Beattie, 63, a seasonal visitor from Edinburgh, Scotland, where he works as a dance DJ.
“I’ve been shopping here for probably 20 years,” said Beattie, digging through LPs and 45-rpm singles in a back storage room of the original shop.
“There are brilliant records in this store that most people don’t tend to have, and those are the ones that people like to dance to.”
Among vintage vinyl collectors, some rarities can fetch astronomical prices. A 45-rpm single of Frank Wilson’s 1965 Motown recording, “Do I Love You? (Indeed I Do),” which was never released to the public, can fetch more than $20,000.
“You’re looking for that diamond,” Beattie said. “When you see it, then you know it.”
At Atlantic Sounds, ‘Everything came together’ in Daytona Beach
An Orlando native and 1978 graduate of the city’s Edgewater High School, Toole, who opened the shop at age 21, will tell you the path to Atlantic Sounds was marked by more than a few serendipitous turns.
First, there was the lifelong infatuation with music that was sparked by 1960s childhood shopping trips with his mother to an Orlando grocery store that sold grab bags of 45 rpm singles at the cash register.
“They would sell these singles five for 19 cents,” Toole said. “You didn’t know what was in them. It could’ve been anything: Rock, country, classical, pop. I bought them and played them on this little record player I had, and I thought it was the best thing in the world.
“I told my dad that I was going to open a record store someday.”
After high school, Toole briefly considered the prospect of attending the University of Central Florida to pursue a radio-television career. It didn’t work out, so he started scouting record-store locations.
“Orlando was saturated with stores, so I drove to Charleston (S.C.), Savannah, Gainesville, Tallahassee, Melbourne and Cocoa,” he said. “In the end, everything came together right here in Daytona Beach.
“I moved over here in 1981 and I opened in ’82. A lot of the records were duplicates I was willing to sell out of my own collection.”
Over four decades, Toole bought — and paid off — three adjoining retail spaces to expand the shop to its current spread of 6,420 square feet.
Along the way, Atlantic Sounds has weathered the transformation to CDs and the digital revolution to witness a resurgence of vinyl’s popularity in the past two decades.
“I’m selling more vinyl now than ever, both new and used,” Toole said. “Now, I’m selling more CDs than ever, so I’ve seen it come full circle.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Daytona’s Atlantic Sounds record store spins toward expansion
Reporting by Jim Abbott, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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