The 17-year-old runs Moonshot Emporium, a record shop in Sea Cliff, a village off the north coast of Long Island that’s about an hour from midtown Manhattan. The store is not far from his parents’ house, where the teenager’s sizable personal record collection is meticulously organized and takes up most of a room.The 17-year-old runs Moonshot Emporium, a record shop in Sea Cliff, a village off the north coast of Long Island that’s about an hour from midtown Manhattan.
The biggest expenses are records and rent. He said the store got a COVID-19 Main Street Recovery grant that he put into inventory. What started out as five or six crates of records for sale became around 1,000 titles arranged alphabetically and by genre. He started collecting records in middle school, buying his first few from Amazon, which he thinks of now as a little tacky. He also browsed at antique shops, where at the time, “it was easy to… walk out with 20 records for 20 bucks.”“Going to record stores, meeting people there, it’s a whole community. It’s a lifestyle,” he said. Being at home, scrolling on a computer, “you’re not going to find any new music,” he said. “You’re not going to find an album cover that speaks to you.
“When I was doing all these shows, it was my mom and dad who were bringing me and they saw that it was something that was profitable,” he added.